—Six of this clip’s 14 minutes are given over to the fifth set, and it’s easy to see why. Like our No. 5 match, Fabio Fognini’s win over Rafael Nadal at the U.S. Open, the drama in Gasquet-Wawrinka is saved for the final act. Here the winners come fast and furious, from the net, the backcourt, and from outside the sidelines—watch for a rally where the two see who can carve a more acute angle with his backhand.
Gasquet, throwing caution to the wind as the sun goes down, manages to match Wawrinka’s pace. For the first eight games, it's Gasquet who is seeing the ball well, who is reading his opponent’s serve, who is doing the shotmaking from the backhand side. Gasquet, the game’s Microwave, has gone nuclear. When he pokes a running forehand up the line and past Wawrinka to break, this fifth set begins to resemble another that he had won, over Andy Roddick, at Wimbledon eight years earlier.
—Then Gasquet gives it right back. Serving for the match at 5-3, his beautiful backhand turns ugly. Wawrinka holds for 5-5 and goes up 0-30 on Gasquet’s serve. Surely this is the end. Surely, Gasquet, the child prodigy who has lost innumerable close matches as an adult, is finished. Instead, he digs in and finds a way to hold.
“I had to fight, fight, to keep my serve,” said Gasquet, who was driven by the fear of another brutal defeat. “It would have been tough for me to lose after being ahead 5-3.”
From there, the match picks up speed as the two men barrel from 5-5 to 6-6 to 7-7 to 8-8 and beyond. Gasquet continues to construct points aggressively, while Wawrinka continues to serve brilliantly. The light fades over Court 1, but the winners keep flying.
—Finally, it's Wawrinka who blinks in that fading light. His confidence may have been high, but his full-throttle shots will always be risky, and at 9-10 he misses three in a row to go down 0-40, triple match point. On the next point, a Gasquet forehand clips the top of the tape and falls backward; at 15-40, a Wawrinka forehand does the same thing and goes over the net.
Gasquet has one match point left. When Wawrinka drills a first serve near the center line, it looks as if another chance for the tragic Richard G. has come and gone. This time, though, he reaches out and stabs a forehand return back into the corner, and watches as a Wawrinka backhand sails long.
At long last, luck was on the Frenchman's side. Luck and something else: Gasquet, who has always won with talent, won with grit instead. It may not have lasted long—he would lose to Djokovic in the semis in straight sets—but he earned this feel-good moment.