MELBOURNE, Australia — Just like 12 months ago, the tennis gods gave the Australian Open a much-needed men's singles draw. On the steps of Margaret Court Arena, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz appeared in opposite halves, raising the possibility of a first-ever Grand Slam final in a matchup that defined tennis on the ATP Tour.
The 23-year-old Italian and the 21-year-old Spaniard split the Grand Slam tournament in 2024 with two wins and two losses. They hit the ball harder than anyone else and cover every corner of the court, both horizontally and vertically, inside and outside the lines. .
To their opponents, their tennis feels like a different sport than the one they signed up for at the beginning of their journey to the pro circuit.
They don't lack confidence either.
“I'm ambitious,” Alcaraz said during a December trip to New York for an exhibition at Madison Square Garden. “I'm sure that sooner or later I'll be Australian Open champion.”
Sinner said his goal last year was to gain a deeper understanding of what he could accomplish in his career. Two Grand Slam wins and a No. 1 ranking gave him some pointers, but ticking those boxes wasn't a specific goal.
“Next year will be the same,” he said after winning the ATP Tour Finals in Turin and finishing the season with 73 wins and six losses. “Take whatever you can catch and learn the rest.”
Sinner and Alcaraz have been playing tennis intermittently as if it were a fantasy computer game ever since their mesmerizing 5 hours and 15 minutes of shot-making in the 2022 U.S. Open quarterfinals. In 2024, they will completely reshape the sport, with the baseline call-and-response honed by Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, and the arrival of Alexander Zverev and Daniil with their huge serves and counter-punching groundstrokes. – Outpaced the reactive development of players like Medvedev.
Sinner and Alcaraz restructured tennis into a hyper-aggressive game of chicken. Hitting a neutral ball means going on the defensive, and being on the defensive means losing (against each other) or taking points away (against almost everyone). From Zverev and Medvedev to Taylor Fritz and Casper Ruud, ATP Tour rivals are at a loss. Tennis as they knew it disappeared before their eyes.
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Great players win many games and championships. The greatest players of all time change the way the sport is played, redrawing the tennis court to create new shots and angles that were almost unthinkable before. Basketball stars Stephen Curry and Kaitlyn Clark standardize the three-point shot from far beyond the stripe, stretch defenses, create offensive space where it shouldn't exist, and provide the tools necessary for top-level basketball. Think about how we redesigned the kit.
Sinner and Alcaraz have similar influences on their sport. The tennis court is still 78 feet long and 27 feet wide. they are not growing. These two make it seem as if they are.
In most tennis rallies, players who push their opponents into or out of the tramline (where the width of the singles court ends) are likely to score points. Either the angle is too sharp and the ball doesn't come back, or it's soft and floats back, sending it into space.
There is a big difference in what happens when Sinner and Alcaraz are outside the tram. This place, which is considered a no-return zone, is their pride. This is where Alcaraz can show off his incredible speed and rocket forehands that are fired at full speed on or around the net post. This is where Sinner embodies the image of a former junior ski champion, swinging his racket, crouching low and pushing it back onto the court as if he had just come through a slalom gate on an icy slope.
Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz have been pushing each other to the limit since the 2022 US Open quarterfinals (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Far more often than the rest of the Tour, Sinner and Alcaraz are scoring points or joining attacks from places they should be losing. It created a contradiction that stressing or oppressing them was a bad idea, most evidently with Alcaraz. They scored one impossible point and then another, lifting the crowd and pointing to their ears as an avalanche began to roar down the mountain.
Zverev knows that he is ranked second in the world but not mentally, and he knows what this feels like. He rarely tires during tennis matches, even in five-set matches, the longest in a Grand Slam. The 2024 French Open final against Alcaraz was different. By the fifth set, his legs were no longer working and his body was weakened by the relentless challenge that he expected would define his tennis for years to come.
“Everyone is talking about how good their defense is,” Zverev said after defeating Alcaraz at the ATP Tour Finals in Turin. he doesn't buy it.
“Tennis is no longer about defense,” he added.
“I think a few years ago, those guys are just attacking 90 percent of the time. Being able to keep up with their offensive power and being able to keep up with the speed of their groundstrokes. That's the most important thing. Never take a step back and go for the shot when it matters.During my career, I also had a hard time believing in my shot and going for it when I needed to. By the way, maybe.”
Him, and almost everyone else. This is where Sinner and Alcaraz are playing tennis. Movement in and out of corners, in particular, has become as important as serve and return. Ben Shelton realized his 150 mph serves and powerful forehands were limiting, so he hired movement specialist Gabriel Echevarria early last year. Naomi Osaka hired a ballerina to increase her certainty and speed in the corners. Almost every player wants to master the open stance backhand in order to save the moment of pivoting back to the center of the court.
Fritz, who has long known that he struggled outside the singles line, spent much of the offseason moving to the far end of the tennis court to chase the ball. His coach, Michael Russell, had seen a version of the film before. At 46, he is three years older than Roger Federer, eight years older than Nadal and nine years older than Djokovic. He watched these three players change the equation of the sport, just as Sinner and Alcaraz are doing now.
“There is no room for unnecessary mistakes,” he said in an interview in Italy in November. “Literally, they won’t give you an inch.”
Carlos Alcaraz grows by scoring points from seemingly impossible positions (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
When Russell uses the word “error,” he's not talking about balls that fly too long or go into the net, even if they don't have enough force. He's talking about a ball that doesn't have enough speed, depth, or width to thwart the exploits of Sinner and Alcaraz. For decades, the first principle of tennis has been to reset points and change their state from attacking to neutral, or from defending to neutral. Sinar and Alcaraz will not tolerate this. There's a reason why Fritz and Zverev, the two players closest to Sinner and Alcaraz in the rankings, have spent so much time over the past few months learning how to set contract terms.
“Even if it's just one or two points in a game, it can be the difference. We put psychological pressure on them to not just float the ball and reset,” Russell said.
This is what Alcaraz and Sinner do so well, much better than their contemporaries on the ATP Tour.
The reversal of points from defense to offense is codified by data experts TennisViz and Tennis Data Innovations as a “steal score,” which measures how often a player scores points from defense. Alcaraz is on top. Sinners are not far away.
Across the ATP Tour, players take shots from outside the singles sideline about 17 percent of the time, but Sinner and Alcaraz earn about 45 percent of the points they play from there. The opponent wins by about 30.
From outside the doubles line, Alcaraz scores 43% of his points and Sinner 42 points. Alcaraz's opponents get about 22%. The offender is about 29 years old.
Like Zverev and Fritz, Casper Ruud, who spent most of 2024 feeling light-headed, doesn't appreciate the tennis that took him to three Grand Slam finals in 12 months in 2022 and 2023. . After spending years perfecting the balance between patience and deadly balance, on his forehand, he felt Sinner and Alcaraz passing him in tennis. The deep loop shots he has long used to hit the point are completely useless. He needs to change or he will perish as a top team.
“They can turn points around with one stroke on the run, whether it's a forehand or a backhand,” he said in an interview in Italy in November. “I feel like that’s something that’s definitely missing from my game on the faster hard courts.
“That's something I want to continue to work on in the coming weeks and months. But I'm not going to change the way I do things in a day or a week. It's going to take time.”
The meeting between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz inevitably descends into a game of tennis chicken (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Ruud is 26 years old. Fritz and Zverev are 27 years old. Having spent most of their tennis careers hitting the ceiling of the Big Three, they and their peers are now having to make mid-career adjustments. I achieved my dream before playing sports.
Younger players may have an advantage, even if they are juniors. Just as many of them are trying to master Alcaraz's drop shot, lob combination, they are growing up knowing what they have to do to reach the pinnacle of tennis. The rest of the ATP Tour can feel like you're climbing a mountain that melts just before the apex and then re-forms with new terrain and a higher peak.
Sinner and Alcaraz are reinventing tennis for others, but what happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object? What will the Australian Open final everyone want to see look like? ?
“There's more tension. This is a game that most people want to see, so I hope they pay more attention to us,” Sinner said at Friday's Melbourne press conference.
“First of all, you have to get to this stage where you are playing against Carlos, which is a very difficult part to get through. I think he feels the same way when that happens. It's a little bit different. When two players play against each other and bring out the best in themselves, the quality of the match is usually very high, so we usually have a high-quality match.”
Despite Alcaraz having a 6-4 advantage in the rivalry, Sinner spent most of the year as No. 1 in the world. Alcaraz won all three tournaments last year, most recently in the China Open final in Beijing, coming from a 3-0 deficit to defeat Sinner 6-7 (6), 6-4, 7 in a decisive tiebreaker. Defeated by -6(3). There are 7 points from different galaxies.
Mr. Alcaraz said in New York in December that he and his friends thought it was pretty strange that Mr. Sinner was No. 1 without a win last year. Sinner is now beating him on serve. Alcaraz is a great player in the forecourt and has vertical movement to go with the lateral magic tricks they share.
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Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner face off in their respective tennis worlds
It may have a little to do with the edge he holds in the depths of the tennis court. When they moved across the singles line, their point performance was nearly even, with Alcaraz winning 36 percent of the points and Sinner 38 percent.
Outside the doubles line, Alcaraz has a clear advantage, winning 36 percent of the points to Sinner's 30 percent. In general, they are trying to push each other to greater heights, which also forces them to lose some points that they would have won to someone else.
Once they get into the attack, they are two of the best players on the ATP Tour when it comes to closing points. The sinner wins 74% of the time. Alcaraz 73.
However, when playing against each other, that rate goes down if they perform acrobatics at points that send their opponents off the court. But Alcaraz doesn't fall that far. He converts 66 percent of the time against Sinner, while Sinner converts 62 percent from his end of the court.
Still, both still have quite a few highlight reel points when they performed a version of tennis as an escape technique. Djokovic and his 24 Grand Slam titles still don't count, but it's their ability to perform exceptionally well against the only other players in their orbit.
“It's insane,” Fritz said in Turin.
It is he who must strive to defeat them.
(Top photo: Getty Images, Design: Will Tullos)
