Jannik Sinner beats Alex de Minaur in National Bank Open final for 1st Masters 1000 title
Gregory Strong, Daniel Rainbird | The Canadian Press | Posted: August 13, 2023 10:12 PM | Last Updated: August 14, 2023
Pegula claims women's title with dominant win over tired Liudmila Samsonova
For the first 52 minutes of the National Bank Open men's final, Jannik Sinner seemed content to hover around the baseline and fire ground strokes left and right.
He finally tried something different late in the first set. A rare backspin shot just dropped over the net and an outstretched Alex de Minaur couldn't return it.
Sinner would complete the service break on set point and was on his way to a 6-4, 6-1 win in Toronto for his first career Masters 1000 series title.
"Sometimes you have to change it up a little bit," Sinner said. "And I think today this was one of the solutions."
It was Sinner's second ATP Tour title of the season. He improved to 5-0 in head-to-head meetings with de Minaur, who made his first career Masters 1000 final appearance.
WATCH | Sinner tops de Minaur for NBO title in Toronto:
Sinner was the first Italian to reach the men's singles final of this tournament in the Open era. He'll jump two positions to a career-high No. 6 in the new world rankings.
"We were prepared for a long fight," Sinner said. "The first set was very important. In the second set, I was hitting a little bit more freer.
"So yeah, it was a good day in the office."
The seventh-seeded Sinner forced the 18th-ranked de Minaur to play defence for most of the match at Sobeys Stadium.
Each player had early breaks as they adjusted to breezy conditions on centre court.
De Minaur showed off his strong retrieving ability and tinkered with his pace and spin at times, but the 21-year-old Sinner proved too powerful.
Sinner broke de Minaur on his first opportunity but some unforced errors proved costly as the Australian got back on serve at 3-4.
Needing a hold to stay in the set, de Minaur lost all four points of the critical 10th game.
Sinner ran him from corner to corner on the opening point and a de Minaur mis-hit followed. His floater made it love-40 and Sinner converted on his first set point.
The Italian controlled the second set en route to victory in 89 minutes.
"Ultimately it got to a level where I felt like he started to dictate a little bit more, and I was on the back foot a lot more," de Minaur said.
Earlier Sunday, El Salvador's Marcelo Arevalo and Jean-Julien Rojer of the Netherlands won the doubles title with a 6-3, 6-1 win over the third-seeded team of American Rajeev Ram and Britain's Joe Salisbury.
Sinner earned $1.02 million US of the $7.62-million overall purse with the victory. De Minaur, the world No. 18, banked almost $557,000 for the runner-up finish.
"It was a breakthrough week for me," said de Minaur, projected to rise to No. 12 in the world.
Arevalo and Rojer, who split about $312,000 for their win, beat de Minaur and Sinner in the first round of the doubles draw.
Record attendance
Overall attendance for the week was a tournament record of 175,003, organizers said. The previous high was 161,497 in 2010.
The WTA Tour will return to the York University venue next season. The men and women alternate between Montreal and Toronto each year.
The 2024 competition will be the final year that the 56-player main draw format is used. The tournament will expand to a 12-day, 96-player format starting in 2025.
Tournament director Karl Hale said next year's schedule will be slightly different since the Paris Olympics are on the calendar.
Tennis will be played at the Summer Games from July 27 through Aug. 4.
National Bank Open qualifying will begin on Aug. 4 and the main draw will start on Tuesday, Aug. 6 — one day later than usual — and continue to a Monday night finish on Aug. 12.
Pegula routs fatigued Samsonova
Even champion Jessica Pegula wishes the National Bank Open women's singles final could have been played under different circumstances.
The fourth-seeded Pegula put on a dominant display in Montreal Sunday evening, defeating a tired Liudmila Samsonova of Russia 6-1, 6-0 in a 49-minute final that never looked close to capture her first NBO singles title.
"She's had a crazy schedule," said Pegula of Samsonova. "She's played a lot of matches in a short amount of time and it's not ideal. There's nothing we could really do, it was just the weather, but I know scheduling wasn't in her favour.
"It sucks when you feel like you're not on a really fair playing ground."
The 15th-seeded Samsonova, who had already played two matches on Friday due to a week riddled with poor weather in Montreal, defeated Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan 1-6, 6-1, 6-2 earlier Sunday to advance to the final of the WTA 1000 singles event.
The semifinal was originally scheduled for Saturday evening but had to be pushed to Sunday because of rainy weather.
WATCH | Pegula wins her 1st NBO singles title:
Despite the weather, which affected nearly every day of the tournament, Samsonova believes organizers could have done more to avoid having her play twice on the same day multiple times.
"Everyone saw that on the forecast that at 6 p.m. [Saturday] it would be raining, so I knew that. But, of course, it's strange that the people don't care so much about us," she said. "Because if you know that you must, I think — this is my opinion — make a schedule where it's possible to play because we already made two matches in one day.
"So you have to try to do the best to not play two matches on another day. This is my opinion."
'I didn't have time to regenerate'
Samsonova only had two hours and 15 minutes to recover between matches. In that amount of time, she says she couldn't.
As a result, the 24-year-old battled, saying she tried to get something going until she was down 0-3 in the second set, but made error after error, including six double faults.
"Honestly, I would love to have [had] more time [between matches]," said Samsonova. "But they said that it's not possible, so it's OK.
"I didn't have time to regenerate because I was in the physio room trying to tape all my body, and it takes one hour for this," she added. "So I don't know what to say. I was out of the court and then [back] in, and I don't know. It was strange."
Earlier Sunday, Rybakina also took issue with the scheduling and singled out the WTA, saying she felt "destroyed" after playing a three-hour 27-minute marathon against Daria Kasatkina of Russia that wrapped up close to 3 a.m. local time on Saturday morning.
Montreal tournament director Valerie Tetreault said that factored into the decision to push Saturday's semifinal to Sunday.
"With the WTA people we needed to make a decision around 8 o'clock or 8:30 in the evening [Saturday]," said Tetreault. "We knew Rybakina had stayed very late in the night or very early in the morning, let's say, the day before.
"So we looked at the weather forecast, and we had no assurance that the match would be able to be played at a reasonable time."
Pegula, meanwhile, was well-rested after beating world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in the first semifinal Saturday afternoon before the weather took a turn for the worse — and it showed.
As much as Samsonova looked fatigued, Pegula also played flawlessly, winning 100 per cent of her first service points and going five-for-eight on break points.
A day after breaking Iga Swiatek 11 times, Pegula was up to much of the same, hitting multiple return winners with her forehand to break Samsonova twice en route to taking the first set in 20 minutes.
The American even cranked that up a notch in the second set, converting three break points without dropping a single game. In total, Pegula won 51 points to Samsonova's 21.
"I know physically she obviously wasn't feeling her best but at the same time I played a really clean match," said Pegula. "I don't think I made any unforced errors or anything. I played kind of a perfect match."
And though the final was a breeze, Pegula's road to the title certainly wasn't.
The 29-year-old took down sixth seed and doubles teammates Coco Gauff in the quarterfinals before defeating Swiatek in the semis — both in three sets — to reach the final.
Success in Canada
It's Pegula's first WTA title this year and the third of her career. The product of Buffalo, N.Y., last won a tournament at the Guadalajara Open in October last year.
The title also marks another successful trip to Canada for Pegula, whose grandmother is from Montreal.
Pegula played her first WTA singles final at the National Bank Cup in Quebec City in 2018. She also made the NBO semifinals in 2021 and 2022 before finally breaking through this year.
"I'm not really sure what it is. I think it's a little bit of mindset. I've always kind of played well here, so I always come in with a good attitude and good spirits that I can always play good tennis here," she said.
In doubles play Sunday, No. 7 seeds Shuko Aoyama and Ena Shibahara of Japan, who also played two matches on the day, defeated No. 5 seeds Demi Schuurs of the Netherlands and American Desirae Krawczyk 6-4, 4-6, 13-11 in the final.