Jannik Sinner, the top seed and defending champion ended the French qualifier Terence Atmane\u2019s dream run at the Cincinnati Open with a 7-6 (4), 6-2 win to reach the final of the US Open warm-up event.<\/p>\n
Sinner, playing on his 24th birthday, won a remarkable 91% of his first-serve points, did not face a single break point during the 86-minute match and converted two of five break points in his first career meeting with Atmane, the world No 136.<\/p>\n
\u201cVery, very tough challenge,\u201d Sinner said on court after being serenaded with Happy Birthday by the crowd. \u201cEvery time when you play against someone completely new it\u2019s very difficult.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew that I had to be very, very careful and my mindset today was in a good spot. I feel like I handled situations on the court very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Italian world No 1 had his hands full throughout a tightly contested first set which featured an imperious serving display from both men and not a single break point opportunity for either player.<\/p>\n
Sinner, who lost only three points on serve in the opening set, held to love for a third consecutive game to force the tie-break, where Atmane handed his opponent the first point with a double fault and from there the Italian never looked back.<\/p>\n
The reigning US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon champion opened the second set with a nine-minute hold of serve, then held to love before finally breaking Atmane for a 3-1 lead that gave him the cushion he needed.<\/p>\n
Sinner followed that with another hold to love to go 4-1 up and all but end any hope for Atmane, who beat the top-10 players Taylor Fritz and Holger Rune en route to his maiden ATP Masters 1000 semi-final.<\/p>\n
With Atmane serving at 2-5 and looking to stay in the match, Sinner quickly jumped ahead 0-40 before sealing the win on his third match point when the Frenchman sent a forehand into the net. Sinner will face either the No 2 seed, Carlos Alcaraz, or Alexander Zverev in Monday\u2019s final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jannik Sinner, the top seed and defending champion ended the French qualifier Terence Atmane\u2019s dream run at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-72515","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72515","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=72515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}