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“How does clay hide Shelton's weaknesses? First off, it's easier for him to return serve. He's easily rushable on the return. He's worked very hard on abbreviated technique in order to improve on the return. But based on his numbers coming into this Munich final, that remains a work in progress. This week, he went to the back fence. The surface is obviously going to take speed off the ball. It's not going to punish negative court position as heavily. So Shelton took much fuller swings at the ball on the return because he had time to do so.”

“You cannot properly credit Ben Shelton's serve for how good it is without talking about his second. Which, I believe, has become the best second serve in all of men's tennis. He is the leader right now, in 2026, on second serve win rate. In order, it's Shelton, Fils, Sinner, Alcaraz, Zverev. Historically, the players who have dominated that particular stat have just been the best baseliners. Shelton is pulling off an Isner right now. He is atop the leaderboard, and it is obviously because of the serve itself.”

“Cobolli clearly wanted to exploit Shelton's backhand return. On the deuce side, Ben was standing really, really deep. But it was strange after his match against Zverev, when he was locating the T-serve phenomenally well. Against Shelton, he totally threw that away. Cobolli went wide 82 percent of first serves on the deuce. He hit one T-serve all match. It's one thing if it keeps working and you just keep going to it. This was not that. This was just, I've got one serve, I'm going to hit it the whole match and it's not even working that well.”

“Rublev wasn't getting outmaneuvered. He was getting overpowered. It was striking how out of Rublev's hands this match seemed. And let's just remember who we're talking about here. Andre Rublev is typically thought of as a powerful player. He hits big off the ground. He did not look powerful next to Fils. He did not look dangerous offensively next to Fils. Serve damage came easier to the Frenchman. There was an 11 mile per hour advantage in first serve average speed and a 10% advantage in serves unreturned.”

“50% of Arthur Fils' shots were contacted six and a half feet behind the baseline or further. Fils' court positioning was conventionally bad. It maybe used to be the case that you can't play offense from seven feet behind the baseline. That was before Arthur Fils existed. That was before 84 mile per hour forehands on average existed. If you have Arthur Fils' power, use it. You might as well buy yourself some extra time. There's no need to get rushed. He doesn't need to be on the baseline to hit a winner.”

“Fils is a real Sincaraz threat. No conversation about who may start challenging Sinner and Alcaraz in a more earnest way is complete without Arthur Fils. And it's because he matches those two in explosive athleticism. And I just don't really know who else you can say that about. Most guys, most top 100 pros, no matter what they do developmentally, they don't have a chance to be as good as Sinner and Alcaraz because either they don't hit hard enough or they don't move well enough. Fils is the closest thing.”

“Number 1 is Yannick Sinner, winner of five of the last six big tournaments, beat Alcaraz in the Monte Carlo final, and had three championship points in Paris last year. This was just the first pass-through. The point of the power rankings is that as we go through the clay court season, they move around, they're updated, we refine them, we look into them, we make sure that they're really on point by the end. Sinner is currently on top, but there's a long way to go until Roland Garros.”