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Fonseca leaves Australia with a debt: winning by playing badly

Joao Fonseca Federer
Joao Fonseca
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MELBOURNE – It wasn’t Brad Gilbert’s ‘winning ugly’ that he needed, because he wouldn’t know how to do it, but Joao Fonseca came up just short of passing a test of maturity in Australia on Thursday: winning by playing badly.

Winning when everything works well is easy, what is not so easy is to grit your teeth and pull off the match when you do not have the best day of tennis. The 18-year-old Brazilian came close, but eventually fell 6-7 (6-8), 6-3, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3 to Italian Lorenzo Sonego, who will play in the third round of the Australian Open.

Fonseca played at the ‘1573 Arena’, the fifth largest stadium in the Melbourne Park complex, and in the first set he showed what has been seen in other matches, his ability to raise the level in the moments of definition. The many Brazilian fans in attendance were celebrating and making their presence felt.

But beyond what he showed in that first set, Fonseca clearly paid the price for the enormous attention on him these days, for the expectation that the tennis world and he himself placed on his chances in the tournament.

It was a match that started from an abnormal situation: in the clash between the Italian, aged 29 and 55 in the ranking, and the Brazilian, who was making his debut in a Grand Slam tournament, the favourite was Fonseca.

There was a certain logic to Fonseca’s favouritism, beyond the ‘hype’: between the title at the Next Gen, the title at the Canberra Challenger, the three qualifying matches in Australia and the first round win over Andrey Rublev, the Brazilian had accumulated 14 consecutive victories. He had not lost since November.

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But on Thursday, his tennis did not flow. It is true that the Brazilian usually makes a lot of mistakes, because he takes risks and compensates with winning shots, but this time the error rate was maintained without the winning shots appearing in the necessary volume.

The Brazilian, his country’s biggest tennis breakthrough since the explosion of Gustavo Kuerten in 1997, will play the Davis Cup in France and then head to Buenos Aires and home to play the Rio Open in February.

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