The keys to Díaz Acosta, champion of the Argentine Open: power, strategy, order and mental maturity

Facundo Díaz Acosta doesn’t remember him because he was just 2 years old in 2003, when Mariano Hood elevated him to the top after winning the first of his two ATP Porteño doubles titles with Sebastián Prieto. The father of the new tournament champion, a real tennis player, was Hood’s accountant and took his son to Buenos Aires that day. It was perhaps at that moment that Díaz Acosta saved on his hard drive the atmosphere that had surrounded the tournament since its first edition in 2001. And surely that day, one day, he promised himself he would be the protagonist of a dream story.

A year later, Díaz Acosta picked up a racket for the first time at Comercio, a tennis club, and ten years later the promising boy was taken to another place to improve. So that he could approach his game in a different way. And so it was Mariano Monachesi Academy and Hood himself. Almost as if it were the best ending of the sweetest story, Díaz Acosta crowned his week of dreams realized with Monachesi on the bench as coach and with Hood in the Rio de Janeiro table, accompanying Juan Manuel Cerúndolo but following point by point from his cell by calling the definition of the tournament almost 2,700 kilometers away.

Last year There have been many matches for Díaz Acosta. Indeed, won four Challenger titles. And perhaps all that activity has allowed him to be much more solid in this start to the season in which he is slowly transforming into an ATP level tennis player. He has added regularity, order and strategy to his powerful game.

In Buenos Aires, for example, he planned all the matches he played very well, always adapting to what each of them asked of him. Thus, in the round of 16 against Francisco Cerúndolo, he was able to exchange stick for stick against a tennis player who hits the ball very hard and makes him uncomfortable by playing high and heavy and offering long points. And in the semi-final against Federico Coria he went further and surpassed him in speed.

In short, the 2024 version of Díaz Acosta is that of a player who sets the point, who attacks when he has to attack and who shoots when he should shoot. He is a Díaz Acosta who has reached great mental maturity, who knows how to close matches well. And this is another big change.

Against Nicolás Jarry knew that he had to neutralize the Chilean’s serve and that he had to manage his nerves, because there was an important difference in experience in the previous one, given that it was his first final. But Díaz Acosta imposed his game and his corners from the baseline, proposing long points and setting himself an objective: that Jarry did not always hit the ball while standing still from the same point but rather did so running and uncomfortably.

Jarry had a hard time dealing with the pressure of being the favorite. With his deep shots, Díaz Acosta prevented him from taking the initiative and so the winner became increasingly free, while the loser added inaccuracies by not being able to count well on the ball to punish with his shot.

Beyond his tennis, it is always good to underline that Díaz Acosta is a good guy, polite, respectful, a hard worker and who always looks the person he is talking to in the eye. And another fact to highlight these days: Díaz Acosta is another example of what an Argentine club can produce. He learned to play in one in Núñez and two decades later he started to think big in another in Palermo