Grigor Dimitrov has spectacularly flipped the switch with his second serve.

An area that the Bulgarian has struggled with in the past year has come roaring back to form at the 2019 US Open, helping power him through to the semi-finals, where he will meet Daniil Medvedev on Friday.

An Infosys ATP Beyond The Numbers breakdown of Dimitrov’s second serve identifies a substantial improvement the past two weeks in New York. The Infosys ATP Stats Serve LEADERBOARD currently finds Dimitrov sitting at 77th best on tour with overall serve performance in the past 52 weeks, with only 46.8 per cent points won behind his second serve.

That’s yesterday’s news…

Of the eight players who reached the quarter-finals at the US Open this year, Dimitrov leads the pack with second-serve points won at 59 per cent (99/168). It’s actually the highest win percentage of anyone who reached the third round and beyond.

Dimitrov scored one of the biggest wins of his career Tuesday night against Roger Federer in the US Open quarter-finals, winning 3-6, 6-4, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2. Trailing two sets to one, Dimitrov’s second serve was a rock as he moved towards the finish line. He won 57 per cent (8/14) in the last two sets. In the fifth set against Federer, Dimitrov closed out service games with a second serve at 3-0 and 4-1, which were both pivotal moments that stopped Federer making inroads to find a much-needed break of serve to get back into the match.

In the fourth round, Dimitrov defeated Alex de Minaur 7-5, 6-3, 6-4, winning 59 per cent (23/39) of second-serve points overall, and 63 per cent (15/24) in the last two sets. The more Dimitrov needs his second serve to help seal victory, the more it is stepping up in the big moments.

Dimitrov won 63 per cent (26/41) of second-serve points in his third-round match against Kamil Majchrzak of Poland. He faced two break points on second serve and won them both.

An interesting strategic element of Dimitrov’s improved performance is that he is not hitting it bigger, attempting to force return errors. Opponents have only missed putting into play 12 per cent (18/150) of Dimitrov’s second serves, which is considerably lower than Medvedev’s 23 per cent (45/193) – the player he will face in the semi-finals.

The player that wins north of 50 per cent of his second-serve points for the match will most likely be playing in his first Grand Slam final.

At the tail end of an unpredictable US Open, where seven of the top 10 seeds lost prior to the quarter-finals, the battle for seventh and eighth positions at the Nitto ATP Finals is wide open.

With a little over two months to go until the season finale, to be held at The O2 in London from 10-17 November, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Daniil Medvedev have already clinched their berths. Fifth and sixth-placed Dominic Thiem and Stefanos Tsitsipas are in strong positions to qualify, but it is the quest for the final two spots that is eye-catching.

Early losses in the Big Apple for London contenders Thiem, Tsitsipas and Roberto Bautista Agut (all first round), and a fourth-round exit for defending champion Alexander Zverev that boosted his chances, have dramatically shaken up the 2019 Race, paving the way for a fascinating culmination to the 2019 ATP Tour season.

Incredibly, four players — Matteo Berrettini (2,160 points), defending champion Alexander Zverev (2,120), David Goffin (2,080) and Gael Monfils (2,080) — are all within 100 points of eighth-placed Kei Nishikori (2,180), who is just 170 points behind Roberto Bautista Agut in seventh position (2,350).

Berrettini and Grigor Dimitrov are preparing to compete in the US Open semi-finals on Friday, against Nadal and Medvedev respectively, and both can continue to soar up the Race standings. If one of them lifted their first major championship title on Sunday at Flushing Meadows, then they would automatically qualify for London under the Grand Slam rule*.

Berrettini, a winner of two ATP Tour titles this year, started the final major championship of the year in 17th position in the Race, and has since soared up to ninth place on 2,160 points. Should he beat Nadal on Friday, the Italian would jump two further places to seventh with 2,640 points.

Meanwhile Dimitrov, who won the 2017 Nitto ATP Finals title, started last week in 75th position and is now in 25th place, with the possibility of moving up to 15th on 1,777 points with a final appearance in New York City.

While Medvedev is London-bound for the first time, 2018 Next Gen ATP Finals champion Tsitsipas, Berrettini and Bautista Agut are all pushing hard to be new faces under the lights at The O2 in south-east London.

Additionally, the battle for year-end No. 1 has also come under the spotlight with Djokovic’s fourth-round loss at the US Open. Nadal continues to extend his lead over the Serbian in the 2019 ATP Race To London. Nadal led Djokovic (7,265) by 140 points coming into the tournament, but the Spaniard has since pushed the gap to 680 points. Should Nadal win his fourth US Open crown on Sunday, he would have 9,225 points – 1,960 points ahead of Djokovic – and a clearer path to adding to his 2008, 2010, 2013 and 2017 year-end No. 1 finishes.

*The top seven players in the ATP Race To London on Monday, 4 November 2019 (the day after the final tournament of the regular season, the Rolex Paris Masters) qualify for the Nitto ATP Finals. If there is one current-year Grand Slam champion positioned between eighth and 20th in the Race, he qualifies in eighth place. If there are two current-year Grand Slam champions positioned between eighth and 20th, the highest-ranked of those players becomes the eighth and final qualifier; the lower-ranked Grand Slam champion will serve as the alternate. If there are no current-year Grand Slam champions positioned between eighth and 20th, then the player in eighth place in the Race will claim the eighth and final berth.

Top-seeded Colombians Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah will play eighth seeds Marcel Granollers of Spain and Argentina’s Horacio Zeballos on Friday in the US Open doubles final.

Cabal and Farah advanced to their third Grand Slam championship title match by ending the run of British No. 15 seeds Jamie Murray and Neal Skupski 7-6(5), 7-6(8) in two hours on Friday at Flushing Meadows. The pair saved two set points at 5/6 and 7/8 in the second set tie-break.

Two months ago, the Colombians captured their first major crown at Wimbledon, rising to joint No. 1 in the ATP Doubles Rankings. The Nitto ATP Finals qualifiers are now 44-13 on the 2019 season.

“We’re super happy to be here in the final of the US Open,” said Farah. “We had a great match today, a great battle against Jamie and Neal. We’re very grateful to be in one more final of a Slam.”

Cabal and Farah failed to convert match points at 5-4 in the second set, then at 7/6 in the second tie-break, prior to Murray and Skupski making a forehand error on their third match point. Murray partnered Brazil’s Bruno Soares to the 2016 US Open doubles title.

Earlier in the day, Granollers and Zeballos extended their winning streak to 10 matches to reach their first Grand Slam doubles championship final.

The Spanish/Argentine tandem earned a hard-fought 7-6(2), 7-6(5) victory over the all-German team of Kevin Krawietz and Andreas Mies, this year’s Roland Garros titlists, in one hour and 40 minutes. The duo won 84 per cent of their first service points and struck 39 winners.

“We’re in the final in a Grand Slam. That’s one of the things you always dream,” said Zeballos. “I don’t want to wake up.”

Eighth seed Granollers and Zeballos saved the lone break point of the first set with a forehand volley winner at 3-3, 30/40, prior to the pair breaking clear at 2/2 in the tie-break with five straight points. The 45-minute opener, featuring 34 winners, ended with consecutive groundstroke errors from No. 12 seeds Krawietz and Mies.

There were no opportunities to break en route to a tense second tie-break. Granollers and Zeballos won the first two points, but Krawietz and Mies responded to lead 5/3 only for errors to cost the German team. Granollers and Zeballos booked their place in the final with a forehand volley winner.

“It was a crazy match. It was so tight. The difference was only two or three points, so I’m really happy,” said Zeballos. “It was a really tense match. I’m going to enjoy this win today.”

Last month, Granollers and Zeballos captured their first crown on their team debut at the Coupe Rogers, an ATP Masters 1000 event in Montreal. Granollers will now look to go one better than in 2014, when he finished runner-up at the US Open with Marc Lopez.

Prior to arriving at the US Open, Krawietz and Mies had lost eight of their 10 matches since becoming the first all-German team to clinch the Roland Garros crown (d. Chardy/Martin) in May. The team, who is bidding to qualify for the Nitto ATP Finals, to be held at The O2 in London from 10-17 November, is now 21-14 on the season – including the New York Open trophy.

Matteo Berrettini and his team have not hidden their belief that the Italian’s work on his mental game has helped him enjoy the best season of his career, cracking the Top 20 of the ATP Rankings for the first time and now reaching his first major semi-final at the US Open. But behind that is a massive game with weaponry that can trouble anybody.

It all starts with one shot for the 23-year-old.

“For sure, my forehand is my best weapon,” Berrettini said.

The No. 24 seed has finished nine per cent of his points (111/1282) this tournament with a forehand winner, ranking 12th among the 128 players who competed in the main draw. No player placed ahead of him in that department is still alive at the US Open, and more than 44 per cent of his winners and 77 per cent of his baseline winners at the season’s final Grand Slam (111/250) have come off the forehand wing.

Berrettini began working with coach Vincenzo Santopadre about nine years ago, and he says that he has tinkered with Berrettini’s forehand technique less than any other stroke, and it’s not particularly close.

“I think sometimes he can play [his forehand] like this,” Santopadre said, putting his left hand over his eyes as if to say Berrettini can crush forehands with his eyes closed.

“It’s so natural,” Santopadre said. “But if you see a video of him playing when he was 15 or 16 on the forehand you can say, ‘Okay, this is Berrettini’ if you don’t see the face. But the serve and the backhand you say, ‘No, it was somebody else.’”

Berrettini’s toughest match of the tournament thus far was his five-set epic against Gael Monfils in the quarter-finals on Wednesday. Berrettini let slip his first of four match points he lost with a double fault. And in crunch time, he missed a few key backhands into the net. But at 5/4 in the fifth-set tie-break the Italian’s greatest strength rose to the occasion. Berrettini relentlessly attacked ball after ball with his forehand, which even the speedy Frenchman couldn’t handle, eventually allowing him to sprint into net to put away a forehand volley.

Another tough one for the Italian came against #NextGenATP Aussie Alexei Popyrin — a player with a similar game — in the third round, which went to a fourth-set tie-break.

“His forehand is good. When he’s got his position, he can hit it to both sides of the court and you can’t really read it. Usually, I can sort of read where the person is hitting, but with him I had difficulty reading it at the start of the match. And his serve is also a weapon,” Popyrin said. “When he comes in, he comes in well. He’s got a big presence at the net, so it’s not that easy to pass him. You see him coming in and you want to pass him from the first shot, so that’s why you do those mistakes that I did… his forehand is a weapon. His forehand is one of the best forehands I’ve played.

“That forehand was heavy. Even the forehands he hit in the middle of the court, they were forehands I could attack off, but I couldn’t. Usually, I could attack those forehands that came into the middle of the court, but with his I couldn’t. They were just really, really heavy forehands. It had so much spin on it and so much pace on it.”

What Santopadre believes makes it a special shot is that it’s multi-faceted. Berrettini doesn’t rely on one type of forehand — an inside-in blast, for example — to finish or dominate points. He can pose a threat from everywhere on the court.

“It’s good because he can put so much power and [make it] so much heavy and so much spin to the ball that it’s really a tough ball to hit for the player who has to hit the ball. It’s complex [for them],” Santopadre said. “He has a very good forehand from every part of the court. There isn’t just one forehand. There’s a forehand on the right side, on the left side, from back, from behind. I think it’s really an unbelievable stroke because he could play from wherever and how he likes and he can hit winners everywhere.”

As strong as his forehand is, Berrettini has anything but a one-dimensional game. Berrettini and his head coach note that his serve is his next biggest weapon. The three-time ATP Tour titlist — who has won two trophies in 2019 — has hit 66 aces, good for seventh at this year’s US Open.

Berrettini has won 78 per cent of his first-serve points, better than anyone who has played more than three matches at this event except for Rafael Nadal (79%), his semi-final opponent.

“I think I did also a great job with my backhand today. With the slice I was mixing well. I’m really proud of my tennis today,” Berrettini said after his victory against Monfils.

A power game and a devastating backhand slice don’t always go together. But when Berrettini was 17, he hurt his left wrist. So, for three months, all he was able to do was slice.

“Vincenzo, my coach, he used to play just slice, no spin at all, no topspin at all. I guess he knows how to teach slice,” Berrettini said, cracking a smile, after his fourth-round win against Andrey Rublev. “I’ve been working [on it] a lot. I’m practising a lot with Flavio Cipolla, a good friend of mine [who is] playing with unbelievable slice. I called him and said, ‘I was playing the slice like you today’, because I was feeling really well. Yeah, that’s the secret.”

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Craig O’Shannessy, who has been a part of World No. 1 Novak Djokovic’s coaching team, began working on analytics with Berrettini and the Italian’s team this year. And he also believes that is an important part of Berrettini’s game.

“The forehand is the big weapon,” O’Shannessy said. “I really like his backhand slice. It neutralises the opponent’s backhand really well. When I see him hit it, I rarely see opponents do something with it. I don’t see them hitting winners off his backhand slice. I don’t see them coming to the net off it. But ultimately, it’s a neutralising play and the forehand is what he does the most damage with.”

Overall, Berrettini, whose upper body isn’t all that different in build from Stan Wawrinka, is never going to back away from his own game plan. At Wimbledon, he played Roger Federer in the fourth round.

“I think I have the weapons to play my match and see what’s going to happen,” Berrettini said at the time.

Although he lost in straight sets, that mindset and those tools have helped Berrettini to enjoy the biggest tournament run of his career at Flushing Meadows.

“I’m going to use my weapons, for sure,” Berrettini said. “Normally I don’t adjust my tennis for others. I just think about myself, my serve, my forehand, then I start to think about others.”

Such is the nature of tennis that different generations regularly clash and Friday’s second semi-final at the US Open is no different, when Rafael Nadal meets Matteo Berrettini for the first time under the lights on Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Nadal, who won his first ATP Tour match as a 15-year-old in his hometown of Mallorca in 2002, has been a long-term inspiration to Berrettini, who, at 23 years of age, contests his first Grand Slam championship semi-final at Flushing Meadows.

After his epic quarter-final win over Gael Monfils on Thursday, Berrettini recalled watching Nadal beat Guillermo Coria in the 2005 Internazionali BNL d’Italia final, as an eight-year-old, because one of the sport’s greatest clay-court matches happened to be on a television channel that normally screened cartoons.

“I remember the final in Rome against Coria,” remembered Berrettini. “It was on a channel that was about cartoons. I was young. ‘These guys, I mean, six hours. Come on! I want to catch my cartoons’. I remember that it was unbelievable.

“I think also, I was going to school and a lot of my classmates, they actually started to follow tennis more, to watch tennis more because the match was free. They were, ‘Oh, you’re playing this sport then?’ I was, like, ‘Yeah. I’m dreaming about playing these matches.’ And now I’m here. So I’m happy.”

The 2005 Rome final came a few weeks before Nadal’s life changed forever with his first major championship crown at Roland Garros. Fast forward 14 years and the Spaniard has won 18 Grand Slam championship trophies, and Friday’s match against Berrettini will be Nadal’s 33rd major semi-final (26-6 record).

Looking ahead to meeting the Italian, Nadal said, “Berrettini is having a great year. He’s in the semi-finals, winning a lot of good matches… I need to play my best, and I think today [against Diego Schwartzman] I took a step forward.”

With a crushing forehand (111 winners) and big serve (66 aces in five matches), Berrettini can match Nadal’s firepower on Friday, so may be able to dictate, but recovering from his draining four-hour win over Monfils – the biggest Grand Slam win of his career – could be a determining factor.

Berrettini has spent 15 hours and 23 minutes on court in five victories at the US Open, while Nadal has played four matches totalling nine hours and 43 minutes. He got a walkover against Thanasi Kokkinakis in the second round.

Berrettini, who lost to Denis Kudla in the 2018 US Open first round, has enjoyed a stellar season, which includes two ATP Tour crowns at the Hungarian Open in Budapest (d. Krajinovic) and at the Mercedes Cup in Stuttgart (d. Auger-Aliassime). He also finished runner-up at the BMW Open by FWU in Munich (l. to Garin) and has a 34-15 match record this season.

As a result of his US Open performance, Berrettini has jumped from 14th to ninth position in the 2019 ATP Race To London for a spot at the Nitto ATP Finals, to be held at The O2 in London from 10-17 November.

More About Berrettini
Quarter-final Match Report: Berrettini Beats Monfils In Fifth Set Epic
Feature: What Has Inspired Matteo To His 2019 Surge?

Over the past 10 days, Nadal, who in July became the first player to clinch a spot at this year’s elite season finale, remains on course to add to his 2010, 2013, 2017 US Open titles haul and further improve his chances of finishing year-end No. 1 for a fifth time.

The 33-year-old Spaniard has a 45-6 match record in 2019, which includes a record-extending 12th title at Roland Garros (d. Thiem), plus two ATP Masters 1000 crowns in Rome (his ninth) and the Coupe Rogers In Montreal. He also finished runner-up at the Australian Open (l. to Djokovic) at the start of the year.

Big-match experience may be the deciding factor on Friday night, but Berrettini will be sure to do his best against Nadal, a player he considers “the greatest fighter ever in this sport. It’s unbelievable [what] he’s doing. I admire him, the way he’s on the court. His attitude is something that, I think, it’s close to the perfection.”

More About Nadal
Feature: Rapid Rafa – Serve, Play & Win Faster
Quarter-final Match Report: Nadal Battles Past Schwartzman
Quarter-final Reaction: How Does Nadal Describe His Fighting Spirit?

A CLOSER LOOK AT BERRETTINI vs. NADAL (Stats Through US Open QFs)

Statistics courtesy: Leo Levin/SMT