“I thought it was 5-1,” he said. “I knew I broke him twice, but I thought it was 5-1 instead of 6-2, which kind of helped me because I wasn’t really nervous serving the match. Yeah, I just miscalculated I guess.
He broke Shelton in the first game of the fourth set and again 4-2, and served out the match on the first try.
I guess I just forgot the account. Not much else to say.
Nothing reached him from the outside. “I was very much in the zone at that point, I didn’t hear any noise at all, I was in a tunnel where I just couldn’t hear anything,” he said. “Then, of course, when the crowd is loud, it’s impossible to hear the umpire, so I didn’t hear him say, ‘Game, set, match.’ But at the end of the day, I guess I just forgot the score. There is no need to say anything else.”
The crowd was not his. “I know 99.9 percent of people today wanted him to win, so first of all I’m very sorry,” he said at the ceremony at Arthur Ashe Stadium. “But secondly, it was an incredible atmosphere to play in, even though I know the crowd was against me.”
Six years ago on the same court, in an empty stadium, Zverev led Dominic Thiem in two sets in this final and lost, becoming the only man in history to win a Grand Slam semifinal in two sets and then lose the final in two sets. He says that special weight came out elsewhere.
“I think the scars of the 2020 final kind of disappeared after I won in Paris,” he said. “Before I won in Paris, I was constantly under a lot of stress, because there was always a question mark about whether I would ever win. What I think now is more joy playing such finals.”