Sinner\u2019s most recent five-setter came at Roland Garros, where as the red-hot title favourite he led Juan Manuel Cerundolo 6-3 6-2 5-1 before fading to a shock defeat.<\/p>\n
In his first official match since that unexpected result, Sinner showed some understandable signs of nerves and rust as he played Wimbledon for the first time without a grasscourt tune-up event under his belt.<\/p>\n
Leading 40-0 at 4-4 in the first set, the top seed suddenly lost nine points in a row to drop the opener.<\/p>\n
Having survived a nasty-looking slip in the third set, he held a set point in the subsequent tiebreak before Kecmanovic snatched three points in a row to move to within a set of victory.<\/p>\n
It was also during the third set when patches of Sinner\u2019s white shoe began turning red with blood, which he confirmed was caused by his nail.
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne fall is a tough one because you can get injured,\u201d Sinner said. \u201cI got lucky there because things can go wrong very, very quickly. I try to still trust in my movement. Also third, fourth and fifth set was very important to keep moving in a very natural way, which I did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m very glad nothing happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
The defending champion steadied, breaking in the sixth game of the fourth and fifth sets to progress.<\/p>\n
It marked the first time Sinner had been stretched to five sets in the opening round at a Grand Slam tournament since the 2022 US Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe plus-one shot of him today was very, very strong. Even though sometimes I returned very well, he was always playing the first ball very well, and I struggled a bit. So that’s something where we need to improve,\u201d said Sinner, who avoided becoming the first defending Wimbledon men\u2019s champion to lose in the opening round in 23 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sinner\u2019s most recent five-setter came at Roland Garros, where as the red-hot title favourite he led Juan Manuel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-517559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}