The Forehand and the Tea Ritual: Darderi Meets Sweeny for a Place in the Second Week

Third round at Flushing Meadows is where a tournament stops being a formality and starts telling stories. Luciano Darderi arrives as the No. 21 seed, with two draining four-set wins behind him and a fresh conviction that hard courts are no longer a foreign country. Dane Sweeny arrives on a wild card, in his first US Open main draw, having beaten Lorenzo Musetti and become the last singles player left from his national contingent. One of them will reach the second week of a major for the first time; the other will feel he let something slip that does not come around often.

Darderi Is Winning Ugly, and That Is Not Nothing

The old label — clay-court specialist — has been peeling off Darderi all summer. Montreal did most of the work: he kept surviving awkward starts, kept adding weight to the forehand as matches wore on, and afterwards said plainly, "I was always a clay-court player and now I'm playing well on hard." That was not bravado. It was a man noticing something about himself in real time.

The trouble is that the good weeks have not stitched themselves together. Brandon Nakashima took the first strike away from him in Montreal and pulled clear once the second set reached its pressure phase. Cincinnati brought nothing. At Winston-Salem he came back to beat Mattia Bellucci and then produced a strikingly flat night against Botic van de Zandschulp, looking drained with tape under his left knee. His competitive level, right now, is running well ahead of his clean-execution level.

New York has followed that script exactly. His opener was a demanding, uneven four-setter against an opponent playing freely, and Darderi found his best tennis late: "From 5-4 in the fourth I felt better; I finished strongly, playing great tennis." The second round against Svrcina was worse — he lost control of the second set, the match turned break-heavy and unstable on serve, and he was audibly relieved to close it out: "Svrcina is a fighter; it was important to avoid the fifth set."

He is also honest about temperament. Before the tournament he explained that throwing a racket can be a release, then added the caveat that matters here: "I know I have to control myself because anger costs points and games." Against an opponent who returns balls that have no business coming back, that sentence is practically a tactical instruction.

Sweeny Found a Way to Stop the Doubts Sticking

Sweeny's North American summer read like a familiar minor-league tale: good starts, no finish. He led early in Montreal qualifying before being turned around in a tight middle set, and in Cincinnati he again won the opening phase and could not close. His movement and rally tolerance were already fine. Converting was the problem.

New York has flipped it. He was nervous and 5-2 down in the first set of his opener against Corentin Moutet, and instead of unravelling he went quiet inside his own head. Moutet's wrist trouble and eventual retirement blunt the result as pure evidence, but the recovery from that start was genuine. "I stayed really calm, and that allowed me to see the match clearly," he said — and in his case calm is not a platitude but a built habit, assembled from meditation, mindfulness and a slow morning tea with his partner Laurza.

Against Musetti it looked like a weapon. Musetti controlled the opening by varying depth and spin and keeping Sweeny away from the court positions where his forehand accelerates. Then Sweeny raised his pace, and at roughly the same moment Musetti's movement fell apart — treatment at 3-0 in the third, visible trouble pushing off and moving sideways, no official diagnosis. The caveat is real; so is the fact that Sweeny had already lifted his level before it became unmistakable.

What he did next is the part worth keeping. He held his depth rather than overplaying against a compromised opponent, kept making Musetti run, came forward to close points, and when Musetti clawed breaks back late he did not flinch. Reports had him running Musetti ragged and bossing the closing stages, with the dives and the redirections pulling a neutral crowd onto his side. His line afterwards fit the week: "Tennis can change in the flip of a coin; you've just got to keep persevering."

Who Decides Where the Forehands Get Hit

The tactical question is narrow and clear. Darderi owns the heavier, more forceful first strike, and his job is to get the forehand established before Sweeny turns the rally into a footrace and a redirection puzzle. The Borges match in Montreal showed the template — more forehand weight, more depth, momentum changing hands after the opening set. The trap is impatience: Sweeny's speed tempts opponents into one extra ambitious ball, and Darderi has been known to burn energy resenting a retrieval he thought was a winner.

Sweeny calls his own serve a "point-starter", which is refreshingly honest and tactically consequential. It means Darderi should get regular chances to hit forehands on the return, and it means Sweeny's protection has to come from placement, variation and the quality of his first groundstroke. Darderi's serve, meanwhile, wobbled badly last round; another break-heavy pattern hands Sweeny exactly the long return games he thrives in. Musetti's early blueprint is the one to borrow — keep Sweeny away from the positions where his forehand does damage, and he becomes a defender rather than an aggressor.

Physically the picture is not lopsided but it is not level either. Darderi's arm overload from Los Cabos was cleared by an ultrasound, and he said after his opener that the left knee no longer bothers him — but he has now played two long four-setters, the second full of breaks and grinding exchanges. Sweeny has the lighter workload: a first round that ended in retirement, a second that eased once Musetti's movement went. He carries chronic fluid build-up around the right forearm from landing on the same spot when he dives, iced after round one, and it has not stopped him diving since. Neither man has a match-threatening injury, and both get the same rest.

Which leaves the head. Darderi is expressive and momentum-driven, better lately at surviving bad phases than at looking serene inside them; his emotion can lift the forehand or accelerate the errors, sometimes within the same game. Sweeny is deliberately detached from outcome, with a stated plan to "try and really stay composed in big moments" — the mindset of a man who once stepped away from the sport for his mental health and calls coming back the best decision he made, coached still by his father Clay. Nobody treats their earlier meeting as a psychological factor worth much. The real contest is Darderi managing expectation against Sweeny managing the sudden, tangible nearness of a top-100 breakthrough and a first second week — and I genuinely do not know which of those two burdens is heavier on a hot New York night.