Bouncing around the Centre Court grass like an over-caffeinated kangaroo. Welting 100mph-plus forehands with so much menace that sometimes spectators couldn’t help but gasp in the middle of rallies.
Plenty more zingers. A tweener lob. Moments when some inside Centre Court were talking about sugar-rush tennis. Big smiles and giant cries of “Vamos”.
With his high-energy, high-class lawn tennis, Carlos Alcaraz is into his second successive Wimbledon final, putting him just one more victory from retaining the title. That’s not to say that the defending champion had everything his own way against Daniil Medvedev.
A year ago, at the very same stage, Alcaraz beat Medvedev in straight sets, but it was a closer and more complicated match this time, the Spaniard recovering from a slow start, and from dropping the opening set, to find a way to deal with the long-tentacled ‘Octopus’.
Even Alcaraz’s mistakes were fun to watch. By the third set, he was so comfortable on Centre Court that he played the kind of shot that you would expect in an exhibition rather than a Wimbledon semi-final: an outrageous kind of smash drop-shot. It didn’t work and there were smiles among Alcaraz’s support team. Ultimately, it didn’t matter.
It didn’t look as though Alcaraz was going to be stopped from making another Wimbledon final, and that’s how it played out as he advanced with a 6-7(1), 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 victory.
"I'm really happy with my performance," said Alcaraz. "I started nervously. But I tried to get rid of the nerves in the second set. After that, I was able to play my own game."
It was Roger Federer who once described the Australian Open as the ‘Happy Slam’, but are we looking at this Wimbledon being the smiliest of all the Slams? The ebullient, sunny Jasmine Paolini is through to the final of the ladies’ singles and now Alcaraz, also known for his smile, will play for a Wimbledon title at the weekend.
Last summer, when he was just 20, Alcaraz landed his first Wimbledon title with an epic, five-set victory over Novak Djokovic. Win again on Sunday – against Djokovic or Lorenzo Musetti – and he would join Boris Becker and Bjorn Borg in a small group of men to have won multiple Wimbledon titles when 21 or younger.
For the third time this Fortnight, Alcaraz dropped the opening set in a match. But, just as he had in the third round against Frances Tiafoe, when he also trailed by two sets to one, and also in his quarter-final against Tommy Paul, he responded by improving his level.
Medvedev had beaten Jannik Sinner in the quarter-finals. But he couldn’t follow up with victory over the No.1 seed by also eliminating the defending champion to reach a first final here. Alcaraz, with all his energy and zingers and almost-cartoonish grass court fun, kept on going and going.
From the blood-orange clay of Paris to the green grass of London, Alcaraz just keeps on winning matches at the Grand Slams - this was his 13th in a row. After taking a first Roland-Garros title last month, Alcaraz will be trying on Sunday to complete the mythical London-Paris double.
There are only three weeks between the two European slams to make the technical adjustments from clay to grass and to reset your head. But the King of Clay, who refreshed himself between Paris and London with a quick trip to Ibiza, is close to maintaining control of this small, much fought-over kingdom: a rectangle of lawn.
