The heavy artillery rolled out at Wimbledon on Sunday as world No 1 Jannik Sinner successfully defended his men’s singles titles amid a fusillade of aces.
After the deftness and artistry of Saturday’s women’s final, Sinner’s collision with Alexander Zverev was a contrasting study in power. The transition felt jarring, like going from one of Disney’s classic hand-drawn animations to a Transformers movie about two CGI robots bashing chunks out of each other.
It was a competitive match, and a highly impressive one in a technical sense, but the texture of the play was so serve-dominated that we could almost have travelled back 30 years to the era of Pete Sampras and Goran Ivanisevic.
Astonishingly, it took two hours and 54 minutes of play for the first break of serve to come up. This arrived in the 34th game of the match, with the score standing at 6-7, 7-6, 4-3 – which soon became 5-3 in the third set when Zverev pushed a forehand long and then threw his racket sideways along the baseline in frustration.
In the second year of the All England Club’s new scheduling policy on singles finals, which now start at 4pm, the organisers were fortunate that Sinner then managed another miraculous break at 3-3 in the fourth set. If this one had gone to a decider, fading light would have necessitated the closing of the roof – a bad look for a tournament that prides itself on being played outdoors wherever possible.
As the shadows lengthened, Sinner brought up match point with an astonishing 23-shot rally that saw him throw up a high lob, trade a dozen backhands, rush to the net to retrieve a deadly drop-shot, and then somehow flick a sharp-angled riposte to about the only position on the court where Zverev was unable to reach it.
Sinner was smiling now, in defiance of the convention that tennis players keep a poker face until the match is over. He had started a little slowly, by his own stratospheric standards, and allowed Zverev to dictate the forehand exchanges in a way that had rarely happened in their previous meetings – the last nine of which had gone to Sinner.
But this dynamic reversed as the match went on, and Sinner proved as much on the final point: one huge forehand howitzer cross-court, another down the line, and then the patented collapse on to his back, which Rafael Nadal has turned into the go-to celebration for his successors.
The match clock read three hours and 46 minutes, after an extended tussle which might have put the watching Nicole Kidman in mind of her Oscar-winning movie The Hours, or left her Royal Box neighbour Dustin Hoffman recalling his own Marathon Man.
For Sinner, it was about time that he logged a major title in a season that had seen him lose to Novak Djokovic in Melbourne and then spontaneously combust in ferocious heat during the second round in Paris.
His 2026 win-loss record outside the majors stood at a ridiculous 31-1, so a big one was coming. This was his second Wimbledon crown to place alongside two Australian Opens and one US Open, with only the French Open still eluding him.
As for Zverev, he had taken advantage of the Sinner-free draw at Roland Garros to finally land his own first major at the age of 29. With that frustration behind him at last, he played arguably the best tournament of his career, culminating in what might have been his finest individual performance.
The fact that it was not good enough said something about Sinner’s flawless poise and unshakeable self-confidence. Still, Zverev could easily take a leaf from Andy Murray’s book, after Murray’s own first Wimbledon final ended in defeat to Roger Federer, and say “I’m getting closer.”