The match was not very pretty at first. Carlos Alcaraz and Alejandro Davidovich Fokina made many more unforced errors than winners. Davidovich Fokina tried to go a bit bigger than usual to beat his fellow Spaniard (though he should have gone even bigger), but ultimately, that just played into Alcaraz's hands.
You must have a couple of elite weapons to defeat him, and Davidovich Fokina doesn't.
Alcaraz had more to play for in the end. If he were to win the Monte-Carlo Masters, he would bypass Alexander Zverev to reach No. 2 on the ATP tour. He would still trail top-ranked Jannik Sinner by a fairly large margin, but he has another chance to make up points before Sinner returns from suspension.
The 21-year-old great reached the quarterfinals last year in Madrid, so if he wins that Masters, a race for No. 1 is genuinely realistic. But he needs to finish business in Monte-Carlo first, and his final opponent (no matter who he plays) should be tougher than Davidovich Fokina.
Carlos Alcaraz reaches final of Monte-Carlo Masters after defeating Alejandro Davidovich Fokina
No offense to Davidovich Fokina, either. He has yet to win an ATP tour-level title, so reaching the semifinals was successful. He will also move up to No. 30 when the new rankings are released next week. But he does not have the skills to battle Alcaraz in an important tournament.
To win the match, Davidovich Fokina needed to win the first set. He was down 3-5, but managed to break Alcaraz and then hold to even things at 5-all. He wilted in the tie-break as he continued to make far too many unforced errors. Alcaraz was doing the same, but he also has the shot-making ability to get himself out of trouble. He dominated the tie-break 7-2.
Alcaraz then built on the first set by getting a break in the first game of the second set, and the match was basically over. Davidovich Fokina was able to win his next service game to make it 2-1, but that game took 11 minutes, and if he wasn't physically worn out before then, he was then.
Davidovich Fokina still hung around and kept winning his service games, even though Alcaraz made almost every service game a chore to win. Alcaraz never got his second break of the set, but he did not need to. He held throughout the set to win the match 7-6(2) 6-4. He will next play Lorenzo Musetti or Alex de Minaur in the final.
Alcaraz has yet to win a title at the Monte-Carlo Masters as he had never previously won a match in the tournament. He has already changed the latter and could very well change the former on Sunday.