Points won by each set: [ 21-28, 30-25, 47-45, 40-35 ]
Points won directly on serve:
25 % Thiem – 37 of 144
31 % Zverev – 40 of 127
“It was an unreal match, two tie-breaks, so tough and so close,” Thiem told former World No. 1 John McEnroe in an on-court interview. “It was almost impossible to break him, with [him getting in] such a high percentage of first serves (81% !). An Australian Open final is unreal, and what a start to the season so far.” Thiem [5] won his second 4-set thriller after defeating Nadal in a longer match (5-point difference there too). The Austrian started slowly, in the 1st set he couldn’t get points directly behind the serve and was broken twice. In the 2nd set he built a 3:1* advantage; between the last game of that set (when Thiem saved two break points) and the end of the semifinal, it was amazingly tight & high quality. In the 3rd set Thiem saved two set points at *4:5 with aggressive ground-strokes (after wasting BP at 3:1). The set was exceptionally long, rain contributed because fell down in the 4th game and the players needed to wait several minutes when the roof was activated. The 4th set depended on the servers, there was only one ‘deuce’, at 5:4 for the Austrian, who took the tie-breakers 7/3 & 7/4. For the 23-year-old Zverev [7] it was just the first GS semifinal in his 19 majors while he’d already belonged to the title contenders at the US Open ’17.