Tsitsipas Rallies Past Fritz to Reach Shanghai Fourth Round

By Taki Panos

For one set on Monday, Taylor Fritz looked like a man who could not be broken. Then Stefanos Tsitsipas found his rhythm, and the match turned into something else entirely. A few days after collecting his 400th tour-level win in Shanghai, the Greek came from a set down to beat the 11th seed 3-6, 7-5, 6-3 and reach the fourth round of the Rolex Shanghai Masters, as the ATP Tour reported.

If you caught our story on his 400th win against Luciano Darderi, you already knew Fritz would be the real test of the week. He is one of the biggest servers on tour, and he arrived in China with his own reasons to want this one. For a set, he played exactly like it, and the rest of us settled in for what looked like a short afternoon.

The opening set belonged to the American. According to the ATP, Tsitsipas struggled to make any inroads on Fritz's serve, and the stats from Tennis.com show why: Fritz finished with 23 aces and won 82 percent of his first-serve points. Against numbers like that, you mostly wait for a crack and hope you are ready when it finally shows up.

Tsitsipas was ready. The ATP described his free-flowing attacking game clicking into place from the second set, and he held his own serve with real authority, saving eight of the nine break points he faced across the match. He broke twice in total, which against Fritz is plenty. Serving under pressure is not the most glamorous skill in tennis, but on Monday it was the one that won him the match.

The second set was the hinge. Tsitsipas took it 7-5, and winning it changed the mood of the whole match. Once a big server stops getting free points at the moments that matter, the doubts start creeping in on his side of the net. Fritz kept firing aces, but the scoreboard no longer cared, and suddenly the man who had looked untouchable an hour earlier was the one under pressure.

The ending had some drama. The ATP report describes a strange sequence late in the deciding set, including replayed points and a sporting moment from Fritz, who called a let on himself. Tsitsipas held a match point, then two more, and missed all three in that game. Plenty of players would have let that eat at them, especially a player who has had a few seasons of close losses to replay in his head.

He did not. He responded emphatically in the very next game, as the ATP put it, and closed out the win in two hours and 13 minutes. That kind of reset is what separates a good comeback year from a great one. Three match points gone and a crowd waiting for a collapse, and instead he simply went back to work. That is a different Tsitsipas from the one we saw a year ago.

The context is what makes this one feel significant. It was his 34th tour-level win of the season and his seventh win over a Top-20 player in 2026, after going 0-5 against that level last year, per the ATP. He ended a long title drought in Gstaad in July, and this is the second time this season he has reached the fourth round of a Masters 1000 event, after Madrid. He also improved to 5-2 against Fritz.

It is easy to forget that Tsitsipas is a former world No. 3 who reached the semifinals in Shanghai back in 2019. After a 2025 season hampered by inconsistent form and a persistent back problem, he is playing with the freedom that made him so fun to watch in the first place. If you want the longer story, our profile of Stefanos Tsitsipas is a good place to start.

The draw paired him with fifth seed Daniil Medvedev in the fourth round. Medvedev, the 2019 Shanghai champion, reached that stage by beating qualifier Dalibor Svrcina 6-2, 6-3, according to the ATP. Medvedev leads their head-to-head 10-5, but Tsitsipas won their only meeting this season, in Doha. That rivalry has rarely been short on tension, and every meeting between them has been worth watching.

My take: the result matters, but how he got it matters more. Down a set, outserved, three match points gone, and he still found his best tennis at the end. That is the profile of a player whose confidence is coming back for real, not just a good week in a favorable draw. Rankings will follow if he keeps producing afternoons like this one.

For Greek fans watching from home or abroad, this has been a genuinely fun October. For more stories like this one, keep an eye on our Greek Sports section. Shanghai has been good to Tsitsipas before. On this evidence, it still likes him.

Sources: ATP Tour, Tennis.com, ATP Tour results.

Image: Stefanos Tsitsipas at the Swiss Indoors Basel 2024 by Skyscraper2010, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).