I still struggle to make sense of Carlos Alcaraz’s five-set win over Jannik Sinner in the Roland-Garros semifinals earlier this year. For 60% of the match, Alcaraz looked completely intent on handing the victory over without much of a fight. In the opener, he fell behind 4-0 and promptly broke himself again once he appeared to have righted the ship; in the third set, going up a break at 2-1 was all he needed to self-destruct once more. He may have won the second, but that owed more to a significant physical lapse from Sinner than any brilliance on Alcaraz’s part. So, down two sets to one to a player who had proven far more consistent in 2024 and hitting his supposedly godlike forehand as if it was Benoit Paire’s, Alcaraz was screwed.
Only he wasn’t, suddenly turning into a rock on serve in the fourth set, and exploding to break with two winners and an error-forcing, low-percentage backhand down the line at 5-4. In the fifth, Alcaraz broke serve instantly – with consecutive winners – and survived a series of deuces without ever facing a break point. The clutch veteran was inside the blindingly erratic Alcaraz all along.
What still mystifies me: why didn’t that player show up earlier? By the fourth set, the pressure should have been greater than it was early in the match, not lesser. Sinner even played better in the fourth, I think, than he did in the third, when all that was required of him was to put the ball between the lines and watch Alcaraz self-destruct. How was it that Alcaraz had command over his most absurd, dangerous hot shots on the precipice of elimination, but not at the relatively relaxed beginning of the match? That skyscraping level lurking in him somewhere could render all opponents not just defeated but irrelevant, but it was as if Alcaraz needed to self-sabotage on loop for three hours before he could allow himself to play at that level.
In the Beijing final yesterday, Alcaraz repeated the trick, against the same opponent. Sinner will not feature much in my retelling of this match, which I feel badly about, but rarely does a close, top-level final have such an obvious main character. Alcaraz left the comeback even later this time, in fact until most people thought it was too late: after spurning a diverse buffet of leads to lose the first set and rescuing the second, Alcaraz primed himself to take a double-break lead in the third against a fatiguing Sinner. He eventually had to battle just to force a tiebreak against an opponent who had won 18 of his last 19 breakers, including one from set points down over Alcaraz earlier in the same match. Carlos promptly fell behind 3-0 – two mini-breaks – as Sinner nailed a first serve and fired a couple deep returns.
That’s supposed to be an insurmountable deficit against a tiebreak god like Sinner. And maybe it would’ve been if Sinner had kept landing his first serve. Instead, Alcaraz won the next seven points in a row, six winners or unreturnable shots included.
Again, the timing is not just perfect but baffling. Why the hell was that immaculate, irresistible tennis player not accessible in the first-set tiebreak, which not only mattered less but which Alcaraz actually led at the beginning? Why could Alcaraz accomplish the most difficult of tasks at a dire moment, but not the seemingly simple task of keeping the ball in play against a tiring opponent, or maintain a break lead on a hard court? Alcaraz likes to talk about how he can take a loss in good conscience as long as he goes for his shots, and in doing so evades the very defeat he’s accepted the concept of. That still doesn’t explain how every forehand missile goes in, and every dinked half-volley that Taylor Fritz would miss entirely not only clears the net but dies in the first quarter of the court. Alcaraz suddenly becomes a good spot server. Opponents, whether the best player of the moment or the most decorated in tennis history, shake their heads, smile, and accept their fates.
And the consistency with which Alcaraz pulls off these miracles. During the match, I was marveling at how many chances he had blown – the break in the first set (plus whispers of opportunities to grab another), the set points in the tiebreak, the double break points in the third, the 4-2 lead in the third, the break point at 5-all. No matter the emotional baggage he’s accumulated, in a match that is there for the taking, Alcaraz eventually and almost unfailingly takes it. Since he fired a 5-0 second-set lead to Hugo Gaston into the sun as a tennis embryo in 2021, I can’t really think of a notable match in which Alcaraz truly beat himself and had multiple chances to win. (His biggest problem now seems to be losing the first two sets at hard court majors before he hums into gear.) He may waste break points in bunches, but he has a rare immunity to the accompanying emotional hangover. All previous mistakes are minimized into the background.
This isn’t supposed to happen, not for any tennis player but especially not one who takes as many risks as Alcaraz does. Roger Federer, for years, tried to harness his shotmaking to beat Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic at the majors. He ended his career 10-21 against them in the four biggest tournaments, with a 2-6 record in five-setters. Time after time, Fed made the matches extremely competitive, only to wilt in crunch time. He’d miss the delicate half-volley in a tiebreak, but he’d also miss a rally forehand for no apparent reason. We would blame both on the low margin in his game, which became untenable when the pressure rose. It was as if all the forces which made his improbable winners earlier in the match possible suddenly turned around and bit him in the ass when he needed those winners most.
Alcaraz has successfully forged a peaceful co-existence with those same forces. It’s very possible that he is gliding on insane fortune, which will eventually run out and steer these stunning, clutch shots wide of the lines. But I don’t think so.
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That the Beijing final has started a debate over who the best player in the world is amuses me. Our very established ranking system tells us that Sinner is better by exactly 4,000 points as of today, a value equal to winning two major titles. The U.S. Open, which Sinner won a week and a half after Alcaraz played arguably the worst match of his career, is not that far in the rearview mirror. Unless you think that beating your biggest rival should be worth 1,334 bonus points just for kicks, you don’t really think Alcaraz is the best player in the world, you just watched him establish himself as the best out there for a week and have a bad case of Social Media Syndrome. By the same token, despite his better year, Sinner is not a better player than Alcaraz overall, who still leads him 4-2 in major titles. We are allowed to let more than one tournament pass by before materializing our hot takes.
The debate we’re looking for, I think, is which player we would rather be. As Serena Williams knows well, this doesn’t always have to be the same player who sits atop the rankings. Alcaraz and Sinner split the majors 2-2 this year; this is a close race, if one with a clear leader, and the gap is not particularly meaningful outside the weeks at #1 Sinner is netting. Are those weeks more valuable than a 3-0 head-to-head record against a primary rival in both players’ most accomplished seasons to date? This is a question that you could truly and justifiably go either way on.
I think I’d take the 3-0. Head-to-heads have many chapters to them – Djokovic and Federer didn’t play their most consequential match until more than 13 years after their first meeting. But they’re also made up of patterns. A decisive win early, say, saving two match points to win a U.S. Open semifinal, can set up an identical win the following year, and even a similar win at Wimbledon almost eight years after that. Carlos Alcaraz has now saved a match point to beat Sinner at a major, won both of their meetings that went five sets, and beat him in the only deciding-set tiebreak they’ve played against each other. Losing the first set, as Alcaraz did in all three matches with Sinner this year, does not faze him. We have a pattern: Alcaraz has won more of the closer and high-profile matches in this rivalry. (Sinner did beat Alcaraz at Wimbledon in 2022, but since he didn’t go on to win the title and Alcaraz has since won the last two editions of the tournament, Carlos has already wiped out the consequences of that loss.) Sinner, for all his consistency, is vulnerable to Alcaraz’s lightning aggression when the chips are down. This is something that he will have to contend with, and that might even force him to tweak his style. Perhaps the pattern will break in their next meeting. It could also last a while, bleeding into the pair’s legacy-altering matches of the future, and I don’t think valuing that possibility more than a few dozen weeks at number one is absurd.
The tantalizing notion here is that Alcaraz-Sinner (leader in the head-to-head gets their name written first) will follow a pattern unlike Djokovic-Federer or either of the other Big Three rivalries. With his electric shots under pressure, Alcaraz is arguing that it is possible to play tennis like you’re playing Russian Roulette and still be reliable. Dominic Thiem and Stan Wawrinka have made the opening statements in this argument, but neither could match Alcaraz’s consistency or, let’s be honest, overall skill.
If Alcaraz is the truth, if he can really keep doing insane things like this and maintain a level of control in the rivalry with Sinner, the potential timelines that could spiral out of the present moment are dazzling. Maybe Alcaraz will do his high-wire act in a major final. Maybe Sinner will improve further, either by improving his endurance (the clear next step for him, I think) or by trying to match Alcaraz in the forecourt, and can learn to neuter Carlos’s creativity for an entire match. Other players will have to be braver because the standard has been raised. Alcaraz might need to add the vintage Djokodal “on this point I will rally for 50 shots and never miss” string to his bow. I’m probably being hyperbolic about all of this, but watching a player win seven straight points to swipe a tiebreak from a world #1 on a winning streak in breakers will do that to a person. What Alcaraz is doing may conflict with every law of tennis we know to exist, but it works. If it were too good to be true, the luck would have run out by now.
Popcorn Tennis 