It has been quite a year for Taylor Fritz: a run to the fourth round at the Australian Open, his first Masters 1000 title at Indian Wells (beating Rafael Nadal, to boot) and winning the Eastbourne title a week ago.

Now he has his best result in SW19: a place in the last 16. He is one of four American men in the fourth round, the sign of a burgeoning group of players from the US.

He swept past Alex Molcan 6-4, 6-1, 7-6(3) on No.3 Court. From first ball to very nearly the last, he was in complete control.

Molcan did have one, brief moment of superiority – he broke when Fritz was serving for the match – but it had taken him 85 minutes to reach that pinnacle.

And 15 minutes later he was back in the locker room while Fritz was doing his winner’s on-court interview.

“I’m really happy; I played an amazing match the whole time,” Fritz said.

“Serving out, honestly – I played fine that game. He was kind of just picking sides on my serve and he was picking the right sides in the last game so I just had to regroup and play a really solid tie-break. And I did.

“I started this year really well and then I had some injuries so I wasn’t feeling great. Then the title last week at Eastbourne really just did so much for my confidence and now I’m feeling really good again this tournament.”

A year ago, Fritz amazed the medics by reaching the third round just 23 days after an operation to repair a meniscus. He had landed awkwardly from a serve during Roland-Garros and had to be taken off court in a wheelchair.

Doctors told him it would take four to six weeks to recover, not that Fritz was listening. He wanted to play at Wimbledon. He was determined to play at Wimbledon. So he did. And only Alexander Zverev was able to stop him.

Coming back fully fit this year, he showed just what he is able to do on this green stuff if given half a chance.

With a ruthless serve, huge groundstrokes and a beady eye on any hint of frailty on the other side of the net, he was simply too much for Molcan to handle. Well, on this surface at any rate.

You might want to keep your eyes on Mr Molcan. The 24-year-old from Slovakia may be the 51st best player on the planet at the moment but his dream job is to be a businessman, a profession he thinks is very similar to tennis.

"If you want to be good, you have to work at it,” he told the ATP website. “If you want to earn the money, you need to work crazy hard to be there. I like it. You have to build your brand."

And in business, you have to seize the day. If a chance presents itself, you must take it or fall by the wayside. So, when Marian Vajda and Novak Djokovic announced that they had parted company, Molcan seized his chance. He asked Vajda to coach him and at the beginning of May they joined forces.

Even before then Molcan had been thundering up the rankings for the past year.

Last May, he won the first four Tour-level main draw matches of his career to reach the final of the Belgrade-2 event where he bumped into a certain N. Djokovic. He lost in straight sets but the very fact of playing the then world No.1 in a final was, he said, career changing.

Back then, he got into the main draw as a qualifier ranked No.255. He left ranked No.180 and then lit the afterburners to power his way up the pecking order to his current position.

Under Vajda’s tutelage, he reached the final on clay in Lyon (and lost to Cameron Norrie) and played the first main draw grass court matches of his life (won one, lost two) on his way to SW19. And now here he was, standing on the verge of a place in the fourth round.

Then again, Vajda knows a thing or two about winning around these parts: he was at Djokovic’s side as the Serb won his six Wimbledon trophies.

The problem on Saturday was that Molcan could not get anywhere near Fritz to show the American what he could do. Not only was he giving the Slovakian no chances to chase after, Fritz was not even leaving crumbs behind him as he swept into the last 16. 

It took 34 minutes for the world No.14 to drop a point on serve – and when he did, it did not matter because he was a set and a break to the good by then. He dropped only four points on serve in the first two sets and only 15 in all. Molcan was not so much kept at arm’s length as locked out of the Grounds with his pass taken away.

The rallies were kept to a minimum – most were under four shots – and once he had recovered from that slight blip as he served for the match, Fritz slipped his game into fifth gear and motored into the second week and a meeting with Jason Kubler on Monday.

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