The fastest of those 12 aces was clocked at 220 km/h. On Monday in Vienna, the serve that once put Berrettini into a Wimbledon final was doing its job again, and it was doing it on indoor hard court against the world No. 29.

The 30-year-old Italian won 83% of his first-serve points and saved all six break points he faced, according to Tennis TourTalk, to beat Etcheverry in straight sets and move into the second round of the ATP 500.

“I think I served really well,” Berrettini told Tennis TourTalk. “From the warmup this morning, I felt really fluid.”

It is the kind of sentence he could not say in June. At Roland Garros, he had reached his first Grand Slam quarter-final since the 2022 US Open and was leading Matteo Arnaldi with a double break when his left hip gave way and he was forced to withdraw.

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The quarter-final he could not finish

The ATP Tour quoted him afterwards saying his body had been through too much. “I’m the last one that wants to retire. I’m so tired of it,” Berrettini said at the time, describing a hip pain he had not felt before and warning that pushing on would have cost him months.

He missed Wimbledon with the same hip issue. By the time the North American hard-court swing started he was still working his way back, and his ATP ranking has settled around No. 43 going into Vienna.

In May, before the Roland Garros run, Berrettini had told Yahoo Sports that he was recalibrating what success meant. Reaching the top 20 again, he said, would already count as a real challenge, and he had hired former world No. 4 Thomas Enqvist to coach him through it.

A derby with Cobolli for the second round

The reward for Monday’s win is a first career meeting with Flavio Cobolli, who outlasted Grigor Dimitrov 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 in just over two hours on Tuesday to reach the Vienna last 16 for the third year in a row. The all-Italian match is scheduled for Thursday 29 October at the Wiener Stadthalle.

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Cobolli is the fourth seed in Vienna and is firmly inside the race for the ATP Finals in Turin. Berrettini is nowhere near that race. For him the Vienna draw is a test of whether the serve, the hip and the confidence can line up over best-of-three matches again, five years on from the Wimbledon final he lost to Novak Djokovic.

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