2024-04-25 10:26:00
Richard Gasquet, out of the top 100 at 37, played and lost his 1000th match on the ATP circuit, in the first round of the Masters 1000 in Madrid on Thursday, 6-2, 7-5, against the Italian Lorenzo Sonego (52nd ).
The thirty-year-old Frenchman invites himself to a very select club: he becomes only the fourth player still active to reach this symbolic milestone of a thousand matches played, alongside Novak Djokovic (1315), Rafael Nadal (1293 before his entry into the running on Thursday ) and Fernando Verdasco (1006, who has not played on the main circuit since April 2023).
Twenty-two years passed between his first match played – and won (against Squillari) – on the pro circuit, in 2002 in Monte-Carlo, at the age of 15, and his 1000th face-to-face on Thursday.
In a thousand duels played on the ATP circuit, Gasquet has won 604 – no French player has done so well in the Open era – and won 16 titles.
To afford this 1000th match on Madrid clay, the Biterrois with the signature one-handed backhand, who is ranked 116th in the world this week, had to extricate himself from qualifying at the start of the week.
Faced with Sonego, who quickly got ahead of himself and trailed behind in the score in the first set, Gasquet held up much better in the second set. But the Italian managed to make the difference at the right time, at 5 games all, by trapping “Richie” on a return which turned into a winning passing, and he concluded the game in the next game, in less than an hour and a half.
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