Berrettini and Cerúndolo, the Sinner conqueror, both come through five-set marathons to set up a round-of-16 meeting at Roland-Garros
Matteo Berrettini saved two match points and needed four match points of his own to come through Francisco Comesaña 7-6(3), 5-7, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(13) in 5h 13min on Court Simonne-Mathieu. Epic.
Matteo Berrettini, Roland-Garros 2026 | © PsNewz
Matteo Berrettini, the 30-year-old Italian world No. 105 playing his first Roland-Garros since 2021, came through Argentina’s Francisco Comesaña 7-6(3), 5-7, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(13) on Court Suzanne-Mathieu on Saturday afternoon in five hours and 13 minutes – saving two match points along the way, needing four of his own to close it out, and producing the longest match of the tournament so far.
The contest was as close to a coin-toss as a third-round Grand Slam match can be. Comesaña, the world No. 102 who had already taken out 14th seed Luciano Darderi in the previous round, took the second and third sets and stood two points from the upset of his career.
Berrettini saved them. The fifth set ran on serve to a deciding tie-break that under the Slam unified rules now in place reaches 10 points; this one ran to 15-13. The Italian held all of his service games across the third, fourth and fifth sets after losing serve only once in the second.
Best run in Roland-Garros since 2021
The match was Berrettini’s first Roland-Garros round of 16 since his 2021 quarter-final run, and his first second-week appearance at any Grand Slam since 2023. The five-year absence between his last Roland-Garros and this one had been filled with the injuries that have defined the second half of his career – the abdominal tear that ended his 2022, the foot surgery of 2024, the run of withdrawals that had dropped him out of the world’s top 100 for the first time since 2018.
He arrived in Paris with a wild card and the kind of ranking that puts a player on outside courts and outside the field of view.
“I’m just so happy, tired, and so grateful for this unbelievable team,” he said in the on-court interview after some tears of joy. “They’re part of my family. My brother over there, we grew up together playing tennis. This unbelievable crowd that supported me under the heat, under the sun, two sets to one down. We fought through this match guys. Thank you very much.”
Asked whether he had expected to be here when he arrived in Paris a week earlier, he was direct. “No. That’s it. No. I’m so happy for that. There is so much work behind that my team knows, how much we worked hard mentally and physically to come back and enjoy these kind of events and conditions and matches. That’s what I was telling myself during the match. I was telling myself that I deserve to be here. If I lost the match, it would’ve hurt a lot but it would’ve been a great battle. I’m so thankful for that.”
Juan Manuel Cerundolo did it again
The reward is a round-of-16 meeting against Juan Manuel Cerundolo, the Argentine who has had a tournament of his own to match Berrettini’s. The world No. 56 produced the upset of the year on Wednesday, beating world No. 1 Jannik Sinner in five sets over three hours and 36 minutes, an effort built on the Italian’s late physical collapse as much as on Cerúndolo’s own form.
On Saturday afternoon he matched that with something even longer. Cerúndolo beat 21-year-old Spaniard Martín Landaluce 6-4, 6-7(7), 7-6(4), 6-7(4), 7-6(8) in five hours and 58 minutes on Court 7 – the closing tie-break ran 10-8, and the contest was the longest match of the men’s tournament so far, eclipsing the 5h 13min Berrettini-Comesaña contest that finished a few hours later, and the third longest in the French Open’s history.
