Reilly Opelka is back on the ATP Tour, and he’s back with an impressive win, downing Constant Lestienne at the 2024 Newport Open.
The tall American has been away from the sport for quite some time. Apart from one appearance at the ATP Challenger tournament in Charlottesville, where he beat Tennys Sandgren 6-4, 7-5, before withdrawing from his second-round match, Opelka hasn’t competed for nearly two years.
On August 5th, 2022, he played his last Tour-level match at the Citi Open in Washington, losing to Nick Kyrgios 6-7(1), 2-6, and it should have been in D.C. where Opelka was supposed to make his comeback this year.
It seems that he felt ready to step onto the court earlier, as he elected the last grass-court tournament in the calendar – the Newport Open, as his place for a comeback.
In his first match, the 26-year-old took on one of the highest-ranked unseeded players in the draw, the World No. 94, Constant Lestienne, who has been struggling with his tennis for a few months, losing seven of his last ten matches.
The match started really unusually for Opelka, who is known for hitting dozens of aces during his matches and often playing tie-breaks. However, in the first set of this match, he hit only one ace, and still it didn’t mean anything bad. Quite the contrary.
Opelka was able to steamroll past his opponent in the first set of the match, winning it 6-1 behind sensational 14 winners and only three unforced errors, as the Frenchman struggled to find his footing against the home crowd favorite.
The script flipped in the second set. The American still couldn’t find the rhythm on his serve, hitting more doubles faults than aces, which is a huge rarity for him, and his opponent was able to take advantage of that, returning the favor from the previous set by breaking his serve twice and winning the second set 6-2 to force the decider.
If some viewers turned their television on only for the third set, they would think that the match was an Opelka classic, as that’s exactly what the third set of this match was. The former World No. 17 was able to hit 13 aces and he won every single one of the 22 points played after his first serve.
That kind of serving was impossible to challenge for his opponent, and this time around, the set was decided in a tie-break, even though the home player had five break points in the set, two in the opening game and three in the fifth game.
Still, he couldn’t use his chances, but that couldn’t be said about the tie-break, as Opelka easily won that 7-2 to win the match 6-1, 2-6, 7-6(2) and reach the second round of the 2024 Newport Open.
In the second round of the 2024 Newport Open, Opelka will play against another Frenchman, but this time the highest-ranked player in the draw, the top-seeded Adrian Mannarino. The good news for the American is that Mannarino lost 14 of his last 16 matches.
