👋 Welcome back to The Daily Theory, our morning rundown to help you stay on top of your favorite sport. I’m Allen McDuffee, your guide to all things tennis.

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Today’s Vibe Check: 💥 + 😬 + 👏🏻 + 😓

Let’s tennis!

Three Points

🎾 A rough day at the office: You can invest hundreds of millions of dollars in revamping one of the most storied tennis facilities in the world, but sometimes things still just don’t go your way. That’s what happened in Cincy yesterday, in which glitchy streaming issues continued, advertising displays surrounding the courts kept flashing during play and had to be shut off, a local power outage halted play for more than an hour, and a fire alarm on center court left organizers wondering if everyone needed to be evacuated. It seems everyone was a little cranky from the heat — even the inanimate objects.

🎾 One helluva match: Emma Raducanu pushed Aryna Sabalenka in what may have been yesterday’s most entertaining match, but the world number one took the match in the end, 7-6, 4-6, 7-6.

  • What she said: “She’s world number one for a reason and I pushed her more than I did at Wimbledon, so that’s an improvement,” Raducanu said after the match. “And also, it was good to have this result on a hard court because it’s very different to grass. I was always thinking that grass suits me a lot more and I still believe that so to have pushed her on a hard court like that, I’m pretty proud of it.”
  • One wild number: Sabalenka logged 72 unforced errors in three sets and somehow still won.
  • Intriguing: Raducanu’s new coach, Francis Roig, told her throughout the match that she was a better player than Sabalenka, noting in particular that if she won the second set, she would win the match. He was almost right.
  • Next: Sabalenka faces Jessica Bouzas Maneiro on Wednesday.

🎾 The cruelty: Just one round after taking down Casper Ruud, Arthur Rinderknech had a collapse of his own. But this one was from the extreme heat in Cincinnati. After double-faulting to get broken in the second set against Felix Auger-Aliassime, the Frenchman went back toward the towel box and seemingly fainted. After receiving medical attention, Rinderknech (perhaps unwisely) attempted to continue play, but retired a few games later.

  • What he said: “From my point of view, it was very sudden. We spoke later, and he told me he didn’t feel well today, right from the start, and it remained that way throughout the match. He tried to stay in the fight. For me, winning that first set was key,” Auger-Aliassime said later.
  • And what he said: Rinderknech later posted on Instagram, joking that he tried the grill version of the GreenSet courts in Cincinnati and that he wasn’t a fan. He noted that he’s fine.