Nine sets won, none lost across his last three matches, to which you can add the tighter five-set victory over Kecmanović in the opening round. Those results have taken Jannik Sinner into his third consecutive Wimbledon semi-final, and that is unquestionably good news. At the same time, though, the world No. 1 still doesn’t seem to have fully shaken off the physical and technical issues that surfaced during and after Roland Garros. His baseline game in particular, one of the sharpest and most effective parts of his tennis, has looked less fluid than it did during the first half of 2026—and, really, for most of his career.
That is also why, and the numbers make the point, Sinner has been trying to keep rallies as short as possible. He has turned his serve into a genuine weapon. According to figures collected by The Athletic, at Wimbledon—and more broadly since the start of the 2026 season—Sinner has significantly improved almost every statistic linked, directly or indirectly, to his serve. Since the beginning of the year, the percentage of points won within four shots has increased by one percentage point, a change that may seem marginal but carries far more weight than it first appears given that these are the most common points in top-level tennis.
Compare those numbers with his serving data from recent Grand Slams and another pattern emerges: Sinner ranks second for average serve speed, behind only Zverev, while no one places the ball closer to the lines, on average less than 50 centimetres away. To borrow one of his own lines, when he serves Jannik is the elite player willing to take the biggest risks. The best part—or the worst, if you’re standing across the net—is that those risks keep paying off. It was easy enough to imagine that they would at Wimbledon, on grass, where the ball tears through the court as soon as it lands, and after losing to Sinner in the third round Japan’s Mochizuki admitted that “Sinner served unbelievably well, and that consistency on serve really hurt me.”
A few more numbers. After the win over Struff, Sinner stood on 97 aces in five matches. His first-serve percentage has settled between 65 and 66 per cent, and he has won 85 per cent of the points behind that delivery. In practical terms, Sinner’s Wimbledon 2026 campaign has been driven above all by a serve that has become increasingly devastating. It will be interesting to see whether it holds up in the semi-final and, potentially, in the final, but for now Jannik has reached the last four. It might have looked inevitable. It wasn’t.