Zverev has been tipped to win one of the sport’s biggest prizes since he emerged as a teenager – but his journey to a major trophy has taken longer than many expected.<\/p>\n
As a precocious youngster, he caught the eye of seasoned stars including Roger Federer as he followed his older brother Mischa – an Australian Open quarter-finalist in 2017 – around on tour.<\/p>\n
With his parents also having played professionally, the younger Zverev described himself as being “born with a racquet in my hand” – and he has ultimately developed into one of the world’s leading stars.<\/p>\n
Zverev has sat comfortably inside the top 10 for most of the past nine years, encountering few problems while sweeping up the biggest ATP Tour titles.<\/p>\n
But getting over the line at a Grand Slam has been a different story.<\/p>\n
His chances of winning the most prestigious trophies were initially hampered by the presence of Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, and then by the emergence of Sinner and Alcaraz.<\/p>\n
Technical issues with his second serve, and a tendency to play passively against the very best, also let him down.<\/p>\n
After losing his first three Grand Slam finals, many wondered whether Zverev had missed his opportunity.<\/p>\n
This was probably not his last chance – but it was undoubtedly his best.<\/p>\n
Zverev settled quickly as Cobolli’s nerves showed, using his powerful groundstrokes to devastating effect in a first set lasting only 35 minutes.<\/p>\n
The second seed barely lost a service point at the start of the second set before Cobolli broke for 4-3 – helped by two double faults from Zverev – on his way to levelling.<\/p>\n
Zverev’s ability to inject more pace in the baseline exchanges helped him decisively break in the 10th game of the third set, but tension took hold in a dramatic fourth set.<\/p>\n
To Zverev’s credit, he reset admirably to claim the decider – before the emotion of what he had achieved was uncorked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zverev has been tipped to win one of the sport’s biggest prizes since he emerged as a teenager…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-626404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}