(Barcelona) World No. 5 Stefanos Tsitsipas defeated Italy’s Lorenzo Musetti 6-4, 5-7, 6-3 on Saturday and advanced to the Barcelona Open final, where he will face the winner of the second semi-final between Carlos Alcaraz and Daniel Evans.

Despite the two breaks taken by Musetti (20th in the world) in the first set, the Greek pocketed this first set quite easily by displaying an astonishing level, but gave up a match point at 5-4 in the second set which revived the Italian.

Tsitsipas recovered in the third set to reach the final of the Catalan tournament for the third time, after his two failures in 2018 and 2021 against Rafael Nadal.

The No.2 seed, however, played its toughest match of the tournament on Saturday: after easily defeating Canadian Denis Shapovalov 6-3, 6-2 in the round of 16 and Australian Alex de Minaur 6-4 , 6-2 in the quarters, Tsitsipas conceded his first set of the tournament to a Musetti winner by default of his compatriot Jannik Sinner (sick) in the previous round.

Three months after his final at the Australian Open in January, the 24-year-old Greek is continuing his strong start to the year and will play for his first title on clay on Sunday since winning the Monte-Carlo Tournament last year.