Matteo Berrettini: ‘Winning Wimbledon? It sounds crazy but I know I can do it’

Sometimes it takes a while before the scale of an achievement such as reaching the final of Wimbledon for the first time sinks in. For Matteo Berrettini it came within a few hours. Having attended the Euro 2020 final and seen Italy defeat England on penalties, Berrettini joined the team on the pitch for the celebrations. They told him they had been glued to the television earlier in the day, willing him on against his opponent, Novak Djokovic.

“After they won I went to congratulate them and they were like: ‘We should have napped but we couldn’t because you were playing; we couldn’t rest,’” says a beaming Berrettini. “And they were really pumped, they were really happy for what I’d done, what I achieved. Some of them are still texting me. We are still in touch. It was just everything together, it was special.

“I remember the first press conference at Queen’s last year, they said: ‘There are going to be two finals on 11 July. What if it’s going to be Italy and you?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah, right, guys, there’s no chance,’ not just for me but also for them. I don’t know the odds of that. It happened and that’s why I think it was so special.”

The following day was even more unreal for Berrettini. The first Italian man to reach the final of the men’s singles at Wimbledon, he was invited on the victory parade in Rome together with the football team – an even greater recognition of what he had achieved. “Even people that didn’t know about tennis, if you tell them ‘Wimbledon’, they’re going to know what it is,” he says.

“It’s so special. That’s why it was so big last year, because people stopped me in the streets and told me: ‘The last time I watched a tennis match was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And you made me watch the