About an hour before the start of his quarter-final here with Roman Safiullin on Tuesday, Jannik Sinner sat in the players area at the All England Club with his hood up, tight to his face, shutting out the world. Tipped as a future world No 1 since he burst on to the scene a couple of years ago, the Italian had lost all of four previous grand slam quarter‑finals. Fifth time round, he was desperate to get everything right: 2hr 14min later, Sinner had completed the job, his 6-4, 3-6, 6-2, 6-2 win against the 25-year-old Russian taking him into the Wimbledon semi-finals.
“It means a lot to me,” the softly spoken Italian said. “We put many hours of work in and many sacrifices off court for this moment.”
Sinner led by a set and 3-1 before Safiullin, ranked 92 and in his first Wimbledon, won five successive games to level the match. At that stage, as Sinner said later, he “got down mentally a little bit” but he regrouped and pulled away for a confident victory. He will play the seven‑time champion Novak Djokovic for a place in the final.
Such has been the hype about Sinner in the past two years that it hardly seems possible that he is still just 21. Yet he is the youngest men’s semi-finalist at Wimbledon since 2007 and he is only the third Italian man in history to reach the last four here, after Nicola Pietrangeli in 1960 and Matteo Berrettini, who was the first Italian man to reach the final when runner-up to Djokovic in 2021.
Beaten by Djokovic himself in the quarter-finals 12 months ago, when he led by two sets to love, Sinner is a much-improved player, physically and mentally. “I can stay on court for many hours without suffering,” he said.
“Knowing you are also a top-10 player, it is a little bit different [mentally]. If I have to play the slice, I can play now without thinking. Before it was always a little bit different. I can go to the net knowing that I have good volleys. I have some good things now in my game, and hopefully I can use it in the right way.”
The addition to his team of Darren Cahill – the Australian coach who helped Lleyton Hewitt, Andre Agassi and Simona Halep – has added steel and experience to go with his obvious talent. “For sure Darren knows a little bit better how to behave in certain moments like this, something new for me,” Sinner said.
“He knows how to deal with it because he had other players who were much better than me. It is good to have him. He gives me a lot of confidence. He is also a very nice man who you can smile, you can joke around. But he always finds the right words, especially before the matches, he knows what to say, which makes me feel good; comfortable.”
