Tokyo 2020<\/a> Olympic champion, but he has certainly found his feet on the grass. He returns to world No. 2 and now aims to be the seventh man in the Open Era to achieve the \u2018Channel Slam\u2019 \u2013 winning Roland-Garros and Wimbledon in the same season.<\/p>\nThough it is the end of the road for Fery, his home tournament run marks a special breakthrough for the 23-year-old. The wildcard becomes British No. 1 and will debut as world No. 36, having been outside the top 100 before the fortnight.<\/p>\n
Fery knew that any shot at victory would come through neutralising Zverev\u2019s serve, the German towering over the Brit by 23cm (9in) and averaging a serve speed of 201kmh (125mph) on Friday.<\/p>\n
It was Zverev who laid down his marker first when Fery\u2019s missed backhand at the net gave a break to the German at 3-1. But the British world No. 114 created two break points with a stunning cross-court net slice and exchanged breaks to the delight of Centre Court.<\/p>\n
Fery had found his rhythm heading towards a tiebreaker, but that was precisely the moment that Zverev took it away from him and reached the seven-point target without reply. The Hamburg native moved quickly after the set changeover with a break to love for 2-1, soon leading to a double break before holding to love for the second set.<\/p>\n
Zverev was flawless in his game from the tiebreak onwards; in the fourth game, he increased his tempo and created three break points, taking the first with a back-peddling forehand winner to go 3-2 up. Fery kept up towards the end, but it was too little too late for the Brit, as Zverev saw out the result in a clinical performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wimbledon 2026 \u2013 Alexander Zverev marches on to championship match Zverev, 29, had long struggled on the quick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":794820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-794819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}