WHAT HAPPENED: For the first four hours of their match, Casper Ruud and Tommy Paul were fit to be tied. Well, they were fit to be in tiebreakers, at least. Once the match ended up in the fifth set, it was the Norwegian Ruud who separated himself in style to clinch his first-ever US Open fourth-round appearance.
Ruud quickly shook off the disappointment of being broken on serve to end the fourth set by running away and hiding from Paul, the No. 29 seed, as the fifth-seeded Ruud earned a 7-6 (3), 6-7 (5), 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-0 victory inside Louis Armstrong Stadium. The match lasted four hours and 23 minutes, but it took only 30 minutes for Ruud to wrap up the fifth set and keep his chances of leaving New York with the No. 1 world ranking alive.
“Not many times you play more than four hours of tennis [in] a day. It's obviously a challenge,” Ruud said. “But I felt good and I felt physically strong. I'm very happy about that. The match was so close, back and forth all the time. In the fifth set I got a really good start and kept building on it. Very happy with the level I showed in the fifth.”
After the two split a pair of tiebreakers in the first couple of sets, Paul was all but assured a two-sets-to-one lead over the No. 5 seed, up a break at 6-5 and with triple set point on his serve. Not only did Ruud save all three of those set points, he won 13 of the final 16 points to steal the third set. Paul was the architect of his own demise, as seven of the 13 points Ruud won during that final stretch came on unforced errors by the American.
Paul recovered to win the fourth, breaking Ruud at love in the final game, but ran out of steam as the fifth wore on.
WHAT IT MEANS: If nothing else, Ruud’s last two matches have made him battle-tested as he continues his run in New York. In Wednesday’s second-round match, Ruud lost the first set to Dutchman Tim van Rijthoven in a tiebreak before winning the final three sets, all by a 6-4 margin.
After going the distance in the first two rounds, including defeating fellow American Sebastian Korda in Wednesday’s second-round encounter, Paul could not pull off a hat trick of five-set victories that would have put him in the Round of 16 at the US Open for the first time. Paul reached his first-ever fourth round at a Grand Slam earlier this summer at Wimbledon, eventually losing to Great Britain’s Cameron Norrie.
MATCH POINT: Ruud came into the US Open as one of five men who could leave New York with the World No. 1 ranking, though, along with winning the title, other results in the bottom half of the draw would have to go his way to get to the top spot. It is almost 30 years to the month the last time a Scandinavian was atop the world rankings, when Sweden’s Stefan Edberg, winner of the US Open in both 1991 and 1992, last appeared as world No. 1 on October 4, 1992.
