ATP: 4 match balls fended off! Tomic crowns Chengdu dream week with tournament victory

Australian Bernard Tomic has crowned his comeback by winning the final of the ATP 250 tournament in Chengdu in a dramatic match against Fabio Fognini.

After the converted match point Bernard Tomic fell backwards on the hard court, after the handshake with Fognini there was another kiss for the luck court – and the otherwise so indifferent Australian seemed close to tears. Tomic had just won in a very entertaining final with 6:1, 3:6, 7:6 (9) and had possibly discovered something for love for his sport, which he had missed so often.

Especially the tiebreak in the third round was pure entertainment and drama: Fognini had played his way to a 6:3 lead and held three match points to the fifth tournament victory of the year. The first one he made with a double fault, the second one Tomic fended off happily with a forehand and an unreachable net scooter, the third one with an ace. He played match ball number four courageously – his first own offensive, a forehand winner finally brought the Stuttgart-born career title number four, the first since 2015.

“I was lucky at the end, somehow the whole week,” explained the 25-year-old afterwards. Tomic had only entered the main peloton after qualifying, he was already close to the end in the preliminaries. “I could have lost in round two of qualifying, had a match point against me,” he remembered. Both in round two of the qualification and in the main tournament, he won in the tiebreak of the third set – now also in the final. “I’m just so happy I won.”

For the current number 123 in the world, the tournament triumph also means a return to the top 80 in the world. In May, former top-20 player Tomic was still in 243rd place after presenting the peak of listlessness at Wimbledon last year and talking about being quite bored on the pitch. In the spring, Tomic had announced after his qualifying finish at the Australian Open who would now go home and count his millions. Afterwards he had taken part in the Australian jungle camp for a short time.

Does Tomic, one of the greatest tennis talents of all time, really want to know it again? Chengdu could be a sign of this.

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