Wimbledon: 2-time defending champ Carlos Alcaraz needs 5 sets to beat Fabio Fognini in the 1st round

LONDON (AP) – Carlos Alcaraz, locked in a five-set struggle at Centre Court, looked toward his coach Monday and shouted something about how Fabio Fognini – 38, retiring after this season, winless in 2025 – looked as if he could keep playing until he’s 50.

“I don’t know why it’s his last Wimbledon,” Alcaraz said later, “because the level he has shown, he can still play three or four more years. Unbelievable.”

The two-time defending champion at the All England Club needed to go through more than 4 1/2 hours of back-and-forth shifts against the much-older and much-less-accomplished Fognini before emerging with a 7-5, 6-7 (5), 7-5, 2-6, 6-1 victory in the first round.

It wasn’t supposed to be that tough.

Consider, to begin with, that the No. 2-seeded Alcaraz is 22, already a five-time Grand Slam champion, including his latest at the French Open three weeks ago, and is currently on a career-best 19-match winning streak.

Consider, too, that Fognini has never been past the third round at the All England Club in 15 appearances and reached the quarterfinals at any major tournament just once – way back at the 2011 French Open. He entered Monday ranked 138th and 0-6 this year.

Oh, and then there’s this: Only twice has the reigning men’s champion at Wimbledon been beaten in the first round the following year, Lleyton Hewitt in 2003 and Manuel Santana in 1967.

There were times Monday when Alcaraz appeared to be something less than his best, far from the form he displayed during his epic five-set, 5 1/2-hour comeback victory over No. 1 Jannik Sinner for the championship at Roland-Garros.

Alcaraz double-faulted nine times. He faced a hard-to-believe 21 break points. He made more unforced errors, 62, than winners, 52.

He chalked some of that up to nerves.

“Playing the first match at Centre Court, and the first match of every tournament, is never easy,” said Alcaraz, who beat Novak Djokovic in the 2023 and 2024 finals at that arena. “I’ve been practicing pretty well. I’ve been playing on grass really well. But Wimbledon is special. It’s different.”

Next for Alcaraz will be a match Wednesday against Oliver Tarvet, a 21-year-old British qualifier who plays college tennis at the University of San Diego and is ranked 733rd.

Still, Alcaraz said: “I have to improve in the next round.”

Fognini – whose wife, 2015 U.S. Open champion Flavia Pennetta, held one of their children in the stands – is a self-described hot-head and is known for mid-match flareups, including at Wimbledon, where he was fined $3,000 in 2019 for saying during a match that he wished “a bomb would explode at the club” and a then-record $27,500 in 2014 for a series of outbursts. He was put on a two-year probation by the Grand Slam Board in 2017 after insulting a female chair umpire at the U.S. Open and getting kicked out of that tournament.

Such behavior wasn’t displayed Monday. And when Alcaraz pushed a forehand long to cede the fourth set, Fognini nodded toward his guest box, where a member of his entourage stood to snap a photo with a cellphone. Things were picture-perfect for Fognini at that moment.

But at the outset of the fifth – the first time the previous year’s male champ was pushed that far in the first round since Roger Federer in 2010 – Alcaraz recalibrated.

When the Spaniard broke to lead 2-0 in that set with a backhand volley winner, he pointed toward the stands, threw an uppercut and screamed, “Vamos!” In the next game, he saved a pair of break points, before the match was paused for more than 10 minutes because a spectator felt ill amid record-breaking high temperatures for Day 1 of Wimbledon.

When they resumed, Alcaraz outplayed Fognini the rest of the way.

While Alcaraz escaped, at least five seeded men exited on Day 1, including No. 8 Holger Rune, No. 9 Daniil Medvedev – who also lost in the first round at the French Open – No. 16 Francisco Cerundolo, No. 20 Alexei Popyrin and No. 24 Stefanos Tsitsipas, who quit because of a persistent lower-back problem after dropping the first two sets. No. 20 Jelena Ostapenko, the 2017 French Open champ, lost, while women’s winners included No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, 2023 Wimbledon winner Marketa Vondrousova and 2021 U.S. Open champion Emma Raducanu.

No. 2 Coco Gauff, coming off her second major title, plays in Day 2’s last match at Centre Court against Dayana Yastremska. The other matches in the main arena, starting at 1:30 p.m. local time (8:30 a.m. ET), are defending champion Barbora Krejcikova against Alexandra Eala, followed by 24-time Grand Slam champion Djokovic against Alexandre Muller. No. 1 Sinner meets fellow Italian Luca Nardi at No. 1 Court.