Italian Jannik Sinner made a flying start in the ATP Finals in Turin on Sunday by beating Stefanos Tsitsipas in straight sets, 6-4, 6-4.
The 22-year-old laid down a marker in the first match of the ATP's season-ending showpiece event in front of a delighted home crowd in Italy's northeast.
Despite trailing his opponent 5-2 in their head-to-head record, Sinner got into an early lead in the first set when he broke at 2-2 and then never looked back as he confidently saw out victory in one hour 25 minutes.
The encounter stayed on serve until the fifth game of the first set, when the fourth seed sprang to break the Greek's serve, needing only one break point to move into the lead he would never relinquish.
Tsitsipas applied pressure on the Italian's serve in the very next game, forcing it to deuce, but Sinner held on to consolidate the break, before serving out the first set to claim it 6-4.
First on serve again in the second set, the Greek world number six was immediately behind the match when Sinner broke his service to lead 1-0, with Tsitsipas struggling to live with the speed of the Italian's groundstrokes.
At 2-0, Sinner forced three break points, but was unable to convert as Tsitsipas doggedly stayed in the match.
Playing on home turf and now a set and a break up, Sinner really relaxed into the second ATP Finals event of his career and never looked troubled on his serve as he methodically ticked off the games to claim a straight-sets victory.
“The match went really, really well and the crowd support was crazy,” Sinner said on court as fans chanted his name.
“It's not just about improvement, it's about destinations and the destination I wanted to reach this year was to be here.
“It was a long week before coming here and I was excited to finally step on court. I knew it would be tough but I think I answered the questions really well.
"It's a special week, such an incredible feeling playing here with the roof closed and the crowd."
In the second match of the Green Group in the round-robin stage on Sunday, top seed Novak Djokovic was due to face Denmark's Holger Rune.
Djokovic can seal the year-ending number one spot with a single win in the Finals.
Matches in the red group on Monday feature Carlos Alcaraz v Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev v Andrey Rublev.
The top two finishers in each group advance to the semi-finals.
The Uefa Awards winners
Uefa Men's Player of the Year: Virgil van Dijk (Liverpool)
Uefa Women's Player of the Year: Lucy Bronze (Lyon)
Best players of the 2018/19 Uefa Champions League
Goalkeeper: Alisson (Liverpool)
Defender: Virgil van Dijk (Liverpool)
Midfielder: Frenkie de Jong (Ajax)
Forward: Lionel Messi (Barcelona)
Uefa President's Award: Eric Cantona
WOMAN AND CHILD
Director: Saeed Roustaee
Starring: Parinaz Izadyar, Payman Maadi
Rating: 4/5
Museum of the Future in numbers
- 78 metres is the height of the museum
- 30,000 square metres is its total area
- 17,000 square metres is the length of the stainless steel facade
- 14 kilometres is the length of LED lights used on the facade
- 1,024 individual pieces make up the exterior
- 7 floors in all, with one for administrative offices
- 2,400 diagonally intersecting steel members frame the torus shape
- 100 species of trees and plants dot the gardens
- Dh145 is the price of a ticket
Gertrude Bell's life in focus
A feature film
At one point, two feature films were in the works, but only German director Werner Herzog’s project starring Nicole Kidman would be made. While there were high hopes he would do a worthy job of directing the biopic, when Queen of the Desert arrived in 2015 it was a disappointment. Critics panned the film, in which Herzog largely glossed over Bell’s political work in favour of her ill-fated romances.
A documentary
A project that did do justice to Bell arrived the next year: Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Gertrude Bell. Drawing on more than 1,000 pieces of archival footage, 1,700 documents and 1,600 letters, the filmmakers painstakingly pieced together a compelling narrative that managed to convey both the depth of Bell’s experience and her tortured love life.
Books, letters and archives
Two biographies have been written about Bell, and both are worth reading: Georgina Howell’s 2006 book Queen of the Desert and Janet Wallach’s 1996 effort Desert Queen. Bell published several books documenting her travels and there are also several volumes of her letters, although they are hard to find in print. Original documents are housed at the Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle, which has an online catalogue.
Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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United States
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China
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UAE
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Japan
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Norway
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Canada
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Singapore
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Australia
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Saudi Arabia
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South Korea
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