Carlos Alcaraz went into this year’s French Open following a miserable clay-court season, said Tumaini Carayol in The Guardian. A forearm injury had caused the Spaniard to miss three of his four planned tournaments, and he was badly hampered in the one event – the Madrid Open – in which he did compete.
Such poor preparation would have precluded most players from having any sort of a shot at the Roland-Garros title. But Alcaraz is a “generational talent”, and his explosive, highly watchable game is matched by a “big-match temperament” and resolute self-belief. On Sunday, after “five turbulent, tension-filled sets”, he claimed his first French Open title, with a 6-3, 2-6, 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 victory over the German fourth seed Alexander Zverev.
The win makes Alcaraz only the seventh male tennis player to have won a major title on all three surfaces – grass, hard and clay – and, at 21, he is the youngest player by more than a year to have achieved the feat. After the match, Zverev described his conqueror as “a beast, an animal” who “plays tennis at a different [intensity] to other people”.
He’s not wrong, said Simon Briggs in The Daily Telegraph. It’s not just the quality of Alcaraz’s tennis, however, that makes him stand apart. In its combination of power, agility and variety, his game also offers something unprecedented. He can “pull winners out of thin air in any number of ways, whether by larruping 100mph forehands or feathering the daintiest of drop shots”. His powers of retrieval regularly induce gasps – as with the single-handed backhand pass he conjured in the penultimate game on Sunday, “all while scooting laterally across the court so swiftly that he could have been on wheels”.
And the package is completed by a likeable and ebullient personality, which is confident without being cocky. No wonder there’s a growing feeling that Alcaraz is “becoming the saviour of tennis” – the man who will keep the sport fresh and exciting as the era of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic passes.
Another rare attribute possessed by Alcaraz is an ability to win when not playing his best, said Matthew Lambert in the Daily Mail. His form on Sunday was patchy, as it had been in his fiveset semi-final victory over Jannik Sinner. He had “two shocking spells”, going from 2-1 to 2-6 in the second set and 5-2 to 5-7 in the third. But when he most needed to, he found his game: he played his best tennis in the final two sets. It’s telling that of the 12 five-set matches he has played, he has won 11.
John McEnroe and Boris Becker have both said that he’s a “better player at this age than Federer, Nadal or Djokovic were” – and he’s still clearly some way off his peak. One suspects that once he reaches it, “he will be close to unstoppable”.