This might be Dominic Thiem's moment to seize the crown as heir to tennis's big four

Dominic Thiem’s route to a first major title was fascinatingly ugly – a four-hour arm-wrestle with his own anxieties. Still, no one will remember his miscues and bloopers if he goes on to become a serial champion.

At 27, Thiem is considerably older than most tennis greats at the time of their breakthrough. But then, as the first male grand-slam champion to be born in the 1990s, he was coming up behind the greatest generation in sporting history.

Now that he has finally broken the quadropoly of Messrs Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray – albeit with a little help from Covid-19 and the first default at a major in 25 years – Thiem has the class and the hunger to start assembling a serious CV. Unlike Marin Cilic – the last man to sneak in with a surprise US Open title six years ago – he seems unlikely to finish his career as a one-hit wonder.

Thiem is a human wrecking ball – a muscular, heavy-thewed athlete who combines explosivity with endurance like a right-handed Nadal. He likes to camp deep in the court – again, like Nadal – and takes huge swings at the ball which make it fizz with overpowering topspin.

If there is a hole in his game, it is probably his serve – yes, that’s yet another Nadal trait – which doesn’t earn him many free points. Compared to the Djokovic serve, Thiem has a higher top speed but is significantly less accurate and far easier to read. Still, there are compensating virtues. Once he pulls you into a rally, Thiem can wrestle you into submission like a crocodile applying his lethal “death roll”.

Having said all that, Thiem looked like he would struggle to crack an egg for the majority of Sunday night’s final. The stakes were just too high. Many pundits had predicted that his experience of three previous major finals – as against none for the 23-year-old Alexander Zverev – would be an asset. We were wrong. As Thiem admitted after his agonisingly narrow five-set win, it just made him terrified of going 0-4, an anti-record held jointly by Andy Murray and his former coach Ivan Lendl.

“Honestly, I think it didn't help me at all because I was so tight in the beginning,” Thiem confessed after the match. “Maybe it was not even good that I played in previous major finals. I mean, I wanted this title so much, and of course there was also in my head that if I lose this one, it's 0-4. It's always in your head. Is this chance ever coming back again? This, that, all these thoughts, which are not great to play your best tennis, to play free.”

Viewed from one angle, this dramatic but messy match was a reminder that winning major titles is much harder than the Big Three make it seem. At the same time, though, we should give Thiem some credit. Because his agonising stress levels flowed from a very specific situation.

No one had lambasted him for losing to Nadal in the French Open final, or to Djokovic in Melbourne. But if he folded against Zverev while holding all the cards? That dread word “choker” – for some reason the worst insult in the tennis lexicon – would have been inescapable.

This knowledge was responsible for freezing Thiem to the spot over a disastrous first two sets. But when the situation became desperate, the same threat also drove him forward. As Zverev was reminded, a tennis player is at his most vulnerable just when he seems – misleadingly – to have broken his opponent’s will.

A patchy match threw up a fifth set of irresistible human drama. Both men failed to serve out the win and then found themselves cramping up in the nerviest, most faltering tie-break imaginable. The rallies slowed to a crawl as the players sliced the ball gently to and fro, like a pair of octogenarians sharing a Sunday-morning hit.

Finally, on Thiem’s third match point, Zverev scooped a backhand wide. The job was done, by a 2-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-3, 7-6 scoreline. And Thiem became the first man since Pancho Gonzales in 1949 to fight back from a two-set deficit in the US Open final.

Zverev was inconsolable at the presentation ceremony, twice pulling away from the microphone as the tears overwhelmed him. Thiem was more relieved than delighted.

“It had to be like this,” he wrote, in a nicely judged social-media post. “My career was always like the match today – many ups and downs. I love the way it turned out.”