Update — Aug. 24, 2026: The final went to Arthur Fils, who beat Tiafoe 6-3, 1-6, 6-0 to become a first-time Masters 1000 champion and France’s first at the level since 2014. Tiafoe took a medical timeout before the deciding set and did not win a game after it. Full report.
Update — Aug. 23, 2026: Tiafoe won the semifinal 7-5, 6-3 and meets Arthur Fils in Sunday’s final, not before 4:30 p.m. ET. A first-time Masters 1000 champion is guaranteed. Full preview: Cincinnati’s last day has a guaranteed first-time champion.
A week ago Brandon Nakashima had never won a fourth-round match at an ATP Masters 1000. On Friday night in Ohio he reached his second semifinal at that level in eight days, and he did it by beating the best hard-court player his country has produced this decade.
Nakashima, the No. 27 seed, beat sixth-seeded Taylor Fritz 7-6(9), 4-6, 6-3 in two hours and 13 minutes, and a few hours later Frances Tiafoe beat 10th seed Lorenzo Musetti 7-6(2), 7-5 under the lights. The two Americans meet Saturday night for a place in the Cincinnati Open final, which means one of them will be the first home man in the title match here since 2024 and, should he win it, the first American champion at this tournament in 20 years.
The first set of the day match was the one that decided the tone. Fritz served 14 aces to Nakashima’s five and won 81 percent of the points behind his own delivery to Nakashima’s 70, and he still lost the set, because the tiebreak went to 9-9 and Nakashima was the one who stopped blinking. Fritz took the second set with the only clean break of that stretch, then broke again to open the third and led 3-2 with the match in front of him.
He did not win another game. Nakashima broke straight back in a long deuce game to level at 3-3, broke a second time for 5-3, and served it out. Four games in a row from 2-3 down, on the day, against a man who had not dropped a set all week and had beaten him in Dallas in February and again in the Washington semifinals 20 days ago.
“Just getting a lot of confidence from all the matches I have been playing,” Nakashima said afterward, which is the plainest available explanation and probably the correct one. He saved three match points against Daniil Medvedev in the third round here. He reached his first Masters 1000 final in Montreal last week. He arrived in Mason on effectively no rest and has now won nine of his last 10, and he is guaranteed a career-high ranking of No. 16 when the list refreshes Monday.
Tiafoe’s route through Musetti was narrower and stranger. He took the opening tiebreak 7-2, moved a break ahead in the second, and served for the match at 5-4 — a game he opened with a double fault, in which he reached match point and missed a two-hander, and which he eventually lost when Musetti broke back. The Italian held for 5-5 and the pressure had entirely reversed. Tiafoe held, broke again for 6-5, generated three more match points, watched Musetti erase two of them, and closed it on the fourth with a slice serve down the T.
He won 27 of his 35 trips to the net and finished with 36 winners to Musetti’s 17, which is the shape of the match: Tiafoe went forward, repeatedly, against a player whose whole game is built on making opponents wait. It was his third win over a top-20 opponent this week, after Learner Tien in the third round and Felix Auger-Aliassime in the fourth, and it puts him in his third Masters 1000 semifinal, his first since he reached the final on this court in 2024.
All of this was set up two days ago, when half the singles quarterfinal field turned out to be American and two of them were drawn against each other. That guaranteed one semifinalist. Tiafoe’s win made it two, and it made Saturday night a domestic occasion in a tournament that lost its top two seeds on the same day and has been missing both Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz since the draw was made.
It also matters beyond the weekend. The US Open seeding cutoff falls Monday, and these are the last results that can move anyone. Both men will be seeded higher in New York than they would have been on Thursday. Whichever of them loses on Saturday will still have had the best hard-court fortnight of his career, eight days before the main draw.
