Hurkacz took the title in Shanghai after a thrilling final

The Polish Hubert Hurkacz, number 17 in world tennis, was declared the champion of the Shanghai Masters 1000 this Sunday after defeating Russian Andrey Rublev 6-3, 3-6 and 7-6 (8) in an epic final.

The match was settled in 2 hours and 7 minutes and started in favor of the winner, who He was devastating on serve in the first set and finally managed to take advantage of the breaking ball in the fifth game after several saves by his rival.

In the second set, Rublev found his best versionstarts his turn very strongly and gets a break on Hurkacz’s first serve.

The excitement of a very close final set was delivered in the tenth game, where Hurkacz had a match point saved by Rublev with a direct serve that sent the stands of the center court of the Qizhong sports complex into a frenzy; The Russian was finally able to force a tie break.

However, in the tiebreaker, Rublev squandered his advantages (he went 0-3 and 2-5) and in the end Hurkacz remained more composed to win 10-8.

This is the seventh title for the Pole, the second this year, in which it is the second time in which he has managed to win a Masters 1000 category tournament after his victory in Miami in 2021.

In previous rounds, Hurkacz eliminated the Australian Kokkinakis, the Taiwanese Hsu, the Chinese Zhang, the Hungarian Marozsan and the American Sebastian Korda.

Rublev and Hurkacz have met four times, with two wins for each -the last two, for the Russian-, so this number is now in favor of the tournament champion.

The Shanghai Masters is played on a hard court and has a prize money of 8.8 million dollars, of which about 1.3 million goes to the winner of the tournament.

The competition has not been held since 2019 due to the Chinese Government’s ‘zero covid’ policy, and its last winner was Russian Daniil Medvedevwho this year fell in the third round to Korda.