Jannik Sinner barely breaks sweat to cruise through Martínez mismatch

The Guardian

05-07-2025

The most vivid sequence, perhaps the only real piece of content in this 6-1, 6-3, 6-1 third round victory for Jannik Sinner against a semi-fit Pedro Martínez, came midway through the second set on Centre Court.
To that point the entire contest had felt like the tennis equivalent of watching an injured lemur being run down, idly, by a slightly bored big cat. Martínez had come into this match with an injured shoulder. Hmm. How's that going to work out? And pretty much from the start each break saw the Spaniard's shirt off, shoulder pounded furiously by medical orderlies, eyes boggled, chest hair damp with sweat, while a few yards away Sinner sat completely still and unmoved, a neat man in a cap, thinking.
There was the traditional middle Saturday sports-stars shindig in the royal box, albeit one that dished up pretty much the same approved gallery that seems to have been coming here since 1903. Ainslie. Redgrave. Hurst. Kenny. A certain IT Botham (how many Test wickets have you lot got then?). It was also a day to close the roof on Centre Court as a light drizzle fell outside. The roof really is a magnificent suburban spectacle, the greatest side return conservatory in south-west London. Beneath it Centre Court becomes Kew Gardens, steamy, fragrant, echoey with lunchtime chitter-chatter.
Sinner is a slightly strange sight even in the warm-up. Here we have a super athlete, the boy who could have gone with skiing or football but decided instead to become world No 1 at his third-favourite boyhood sport, but who is also gangly and skinny-legged, with the air on court of a slightly hunched and mannered junior actuary. Right up, that is, until he starts stretching his limbs and doing standing jumps and – hang on – suddenly he's floating above the Wimbledon turf like a white-shorted vampire.
Sinner is also a fascinating world No 1, in large part because he lacks any really obvious point of fascination. Sinner is very, very good at tennis. How is he good? By being good at tennis. His victories are often described as suffocating. But he isn't exactly relentless or repetitive. There are angles, aggression, power, off-your-seat winners. His tennis is great product, like a meal in a high-end restaurant in an air-conditioned mall where everything is fine, good, top-notch, well done but still somehow hard to think about too much in the abstract.
Martínez came out ready to mix it up, his only real chance of making any impact. There were some netted volleys, missed first serves, an early dropped service game. Seven minutes in he already looked surrounded. So he came to the net and volleyed more. He chucked in a 76mph high-kick first serve. Twenty minutes in: 5-0 Sinner. A 6-1 first set felt like a minor salvage job.
The second seemed to heading the same way until, at 4-2 down, and with Martínez already serving like a man leaning back in a rocking chair and listening to his neck creak, that brief moment of tension arrived. It looked like a combination of endorphins and what-the-heck professional pride. Either way Martínez managed to muster a couple of games that lasted almost as long as the match to that point.
The first extended deuce did feel like like an act of mild torture. Martínez began to groan and breathe heavily. But he took the game to huge cheers, showed heart and skill, punched the air, and even grinned occasionally.
Sinner's calm through this was also notable. He aced out break points. He stuck to the processes, still wearing the same shrewd, wary look. His footwork, side to side, never back, is deceptively quick and precise. He has that astonishing way of taking balls bouncing just in front of him on the forehand side, taking balls at full power right by his ankles just by bending his knees and whipping those unusually fast hands.
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Sinner steered Martínez gently to 5-3, with an injection of precision, finding angles with his backhand drives, then closing the set with a perfect diagonal half-court volley. At times the power of his groundstrokes was startling. Playing against him involves always shuffling backwards. It must be utterly exhausting, There are of course elements of beauty too. The sudden slice, the drop shot when he's pummelled you back, the inside-out forehand winner with no change of body position, just a small shift of the wrist.
Martínez was done by now. The final set disappeared in a haze of creaks and groans, with an effortless reassertion of crisp, clean baseline control. And at the end the question of how to beat Sinner, how to ruffle his low-tick intensity, was no closer to being answered, at least for anyone not called Carlos Alcaraz.
Sinner has been No 1 for more than a year now, although Alcaraz is favourite to win this tournament, in part because of his excellent head-to-head record. It already feels like a final this Wimbledon is hungry for, a place that has always thrived on rivalries and face-offs.
The styles are a good match. Alcaraz's superpower against Sinner is being good enough to change the angles, to come forward and leave the baseline graveyard. But it will also help Sinner that he was able to move through this match without taking anything out of himself.
At the end he talked up the quality of the rallies and shrugged at Martínez's physical state, praising his ability to carry on. No Italian player has ever won a Wimbledon singles title. On current form the list of people with a fair shot at preventing that sequence from ending this year still stands at one.