Improving Sinner hopes to serve up more success next season

After Saturday’s victory over third-ranked Daniil Medvedev in the semifinals of the ATP Finals, Sinner compared his improvement this year to cooking “pasta pomodoro” (pasta with tomato sauce).

“Everything is part of a learning curve,” the Italian said. “When each of us makes pasta pomodoro for the first time you say ‘it’s missing salt,’ and you add more salt, then you say ‘it’s missing fresh tomatoes’ and you put them in, then you add in basil.

“So you add ingredients to always improve more. But you also have to be careful you don’t add too much otherwise the dish doesn’t become better. You need to find the right balance. My dish is also not perfect yet, I can improve.”

Sinner lacked the perfect ingredients to beat Novak Djokovic in the final, however. The top-ranked Serb won 6-3, 6-3 and earned a record seventh victory at the season-ending tournament for the year’s top eight players.

That was Sinner’s first loss at this year’s ATP Finals — ending a run of four wins that included a first-ever victory over Djokovic.

Two wins in a week over the 24-time Grand Slam champion would have capped a dream tournament for Sinner and an impressive season that has seen him rise from No. 15 at the end of last year to No. 4.

That is the highest an Italian man has been ranked since Adriano Panatta nearly a half-century ago.

“When we started the year I was one player and now I’m another,” Sinner said Sunday.

Sinner was the first Italian to reach the semifinals — and subsequently the final — at the prestigious tournament and his win over the third-ranked Medvedev also saw him become the Italian man with the most victories over top-five players (10), breaking Panatta’s record.

“There are many positive things, to be honest,” Sinner said about his season. “I think, especially the second half of the year, mentally I was much, much stronger. I was not complaining so much on court when things were going in the wrong way.

“One of the things where I can be really happy is that I played many, many important matches in the biggest stadiums we have throughout the whole year.”

Sinner racked up 61 wins with only 15 losses this season, with only Medvedev and Carlos Alcaraz earning up more victories, and also won four ATP Tour titles.

The 22-year-old Italian lived up to his billing as the poster boy last week and was fervently backed by a passionate crowd in Turin — including the ever-present, orange-clad “Carota Boys.”

As the week went on, “Sinner-mania” spread from the packed arena in Turin — where extra tickets were released for the weekend — to the rest of Italy. The final was the most watched tennis match of all time on Italian television, with 6.7 million viewers.

Indeed, the atmosphere inside the Pala Alpitour was more akin to a soccer match at times as fans serenaded Sinner with: “Ole, Ole, Ole Ole, Sin-ner, Sin-ner.”

The adulation Sinner has received is a far cry from the criticism that came his way less than two months ago when he was lambasted by the media and former tennis players for withdrawing from the Davis Cup, saying he hadn’t recovered in time from tournaments in North America, including the US Open.

• Djokovic thrashes Alcaraz to set up final clash with Sinner