BACK ALCARAZ

“Carlos likes to use height on this surface to attack Yannik Center. He especially gets rewarded and this is the way in which he likes to kind of initially build the points. Often get the ball up high into center's backhand. But Sinner was not really allowing Carlos to play that high ball into the backhand because he was so proactive in taking the slower ball into his backhand and making sure I'm going to utilize that time to make forehands and then play on the rise at shoulder level.”

“I kind of do mind the 50 unforced errors from Alcarez because Carlos has the option to just play like a backboard, to trust your legs to keep you in points, to attack patiently and selectively to make sure that you're not overplaying in conditions where it's going to be really difficult to feel the ball and time the ball. Carlos played this way in the Australian Open final against an attacking player in much faster conditions and the roof was closed. They were indoors. So in much more offense friendly conditions, Alcar showed on that occasion, I'm willing to actually win this match with my legs.”

“I've got center over Felix in straits in the final and a fifth straight Masters 1000 for Yannik Center. As long as his body holds up and he serves decently well, the serve is going to be a key for him. I still don't see anybody taking him out, particularly not in this weekend field.”

“Speaking of Coachella, Stevie, you and I brought this up. If you buy a general admissions pass, you get in and then if you're like a Justin Bieber fan, you get in at noon and you run straight to the front. Do we think any of those people wore adult diapers? Because once you're in the front, you can't leave to go to the bathroom and get your way back to the front. For sure, Stevie. They're adult diapers at Coachella.”

“And Koma has the second spinniest forehand on tour. uh via you know just solely based on RPM average. He's literally second after feast in RPM. Plays with a lot of shape and just a ton of spin on the forehand. He's going to get great jump off the court.”

“I want to play this clip of Blair Henley interviewing Learner Tienne in Houston. It is hilarious. Blair is the goat, by the way. And uh I think it is going to tell you a lot. Do you feel like the clay is growing on you at all? Yeah. A real convincing learner. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I mean, it's it's getting there.”

“We know the lore. We know the deal with wrist injuries. They seem to have at times more long-term more like long-term permanent effects compared to some other body parts. If you have a knee injury or something like that, normally we're not talking about it as like a turning point in people's careers, but unfortunately for a guy like Delotro or for a guy like Dominic Team, you have wrist surgery and you come back and you're never the same.”

“You win the Sunshine double. You fly back to Europe. Maybe a Sunday evening redeye, but far more likely to be a Monday morning flight, I would think, or a Monday flight. At any rate, if you take no rest, no rest, you've got six days of prep on a surface you haven't played on in 6 months, and then you have to play five matches in six days in a condensed format, very high level competition pretty much every round. That's tough. You've got to be cut from a a different cloth to manage that. And he becomes the first to do it successfully since NovakJokovic in 2015.”

“The thing that strikes me is those quotes in the in the piece from from Matt and Ava, uh, quoting a lot of the players talking about this in Charleston and in particular Poula talking about how she feels that WTA finals is so inferior over the last few years to the ATP finals from a marketing perspective and from a feel perspective and that is absolutely how it has come across. I just don't think a big event, the flagship event of the tour should be taken to a place without a already established level of support and fandom.”

“Alcarz hits a well-located forehand inside out. center tracks it down in his deep backhand corner. Carlos is in a great position here. He runs around for a forehand and he opts for a drop shot inside out. Theoretically, he's trying to hit this behind Yannik Center. He tried to go behind sinner, but actually behind sinner didn't exist. There was no behind sinner because he hadn't yet gotten into the court enough yet. So essentially what I mean is the whole court was in front of sinner. There was no behind.”

“I guess the answer to your question is no. Like Francisco Roy, it will hopefully help out. Rafa spent an afternoon with her on the court. Like it was super fun. They hung out. That's in my opinion that's all it is. And it's not like EGA is going to be start hitting forehands like this and whipping it around. It's just like spending the afternoon around the aura of Rafa Nadal at his academy on Clay is just like good for the psyche.”

“And it it's buys, Katherine. It comes from the buys. You got you got you got a 32 draw and you give four players buys. So they only have to win one match as Coco Golf has done and they're in the quarterfinals. I just don't understand. I'm quite sure there is a big reason for that that I'm missing. and please please let me know, you know, answers on a postcard.”

“Sport is a means to an end for Saudi Arabian state. It is a to it's a sports washing tool and tennis is a means to an end within that. And on the most granular level, the WTA is a means to an end beyond that. Like they've they've bought themselves some legitimacy. They've bought themselves two years of PR of the all of the world's top female tennis players coming to Saudi Arabia and saying, well, I've had a good experience.”

“Felix, I know, has been quiet of late, but he is a former finalist here. I I struggle to fully credit him for that run. It is indeed the luckiest run to a Masters 1000 final I have ever witnessed. Basically, everybody got injured in front of him.”

“From the trailer it very much looks like it's all about Nadal the fighter and the and the gritty guy and like you don't want you don't want Nadal's tennis brain and the way he helped change the sport you know like with his with his top spin to be like erased from tennis history. I'm like I'm worried that like the Nadal narrative gets narrow and it just becomes about him as this tremendous hard worker and gritty competitor which he obviously was and is a standout feature who battled through injury and big rivals and all that sort of stuff.”

“I think it's a pretty big breakthrough in that sense as well to beat Alcarez and Monte Carlo because this is this is pretty much the slowest conditions on tour. These are the slowest conditions on tour. the head-to-head in slow conditions by my count was uh 6-2 Alcarez, but five in a row to Carlos. I think Yannik will take a lot of pride in beating Carlos in these conditions which are about as slow as it gets. That's significant.”

“Center right now is just on a tear. You said it. Three master series in a row. He's playing so consistent backhand to backhand. No one can go can stay can hang with him. Not even Carlos right now. And Carlos kind of admitted that. And it's so tough when center knows that at any moment I can just lock in on the backhand side, hit the ball crosscourt line, and no one can hang with me.”

“It may not have been pretty, but I bet you that what Center's team will be telling him, and maybe Yanuk doesn't even need to be told this, he should be extra proud to scrap out a win against Carlos Alcarez while playing less than his best tennis on Alcarz's favorite surface. That should be a point of pride for Yannik Center and for Carlos. Plenty of improvements to attempt to make moving forward.”

“If 7 months from a torn Achilles, I don't care if it was a partially torn. No one has ever done it. We're in a sport that you better use your legs and you better be full go 100% believe that you are going to be fine. This seems like a a bad idea from whoever's giving him this thought to go play Hamburg. Even if he takes the rest of the year off to get 100% healthy, he's not missing out on any.”

“I mean, speaking of number one, do these guys at the end of the day really care about being number one or they care about slam titles? Like, would you rather be number two and have more slam titles than Sinner? I think they care about year end number one. Yeah, they care about year end number. I think at this early in their career, I think maybe the year in number one doesn't really matter as much.”

“I love how underarm serves just really expose people, expose the pearl clutches. Like if you've got a problem with underarm serves, like you are the problem. Why are we still booing people for doing underarm serve? It's a binary sort. Brilliant.”

“Five-time Grand Slam doubles champion Jamie Murray has announced his retirement. Um, obviously his his career does deserve the fanfare of a retirement of an announcement and and the ending of it being acknowledged. I feel a bit unmoved by this because in my head Jamie Murray was very much already retired. I literally commentated with him earlier this year. Uh he's the tournament director of Queens. He has like 12 other jobs that aren't being a professional tennis player.”

“But at the masters 1000 events like the winners check has gone down. When I won Miami in 2018 I won more money for winning the title than uh center did this year in 2026. That's spread the prize money out. There's more total prize money, but the winner share was like $200,000 less in give or take in 2026 as it was in 2018. It's insane. It's absurd. No sport in the world has that going on right now.”

“he's from Madrid, to be clear. So he's not just Spanish. He's from Madrid. That means he grew up though. He trains in the altitude. He is not going to be like he'll know exactly what to expect. It's not going to feel foreign to him and yeah, you've really got to like his chances.”

“I think if I were to boil it down, I want great servers and I want huge spin if I can get it. Big forehands, huge spin. And that that's pretty that was pretty well represented last year with Casper beating Jack Draper in the final. two really good serve plus one players and two high RPM forehands.”

“Is and I are in a little group chat and this is a quote from John from Jim Cer. I think Jim summed this up really well because of that wind. That wind affected Carlos's creativity more than it affected Sinner's uh consistency. That was from Jim Courier. I think that's like summed it up really well. Carlos, especially in the second set, just seemed like he was couldn't find the momentum.”

“So I was going to bring this up. From what I hear is like if you're a top if you're top five in the world or maybe like a top five seed, but you also have to be top five in the world too. I think you get a Porsche for playing and then if you win the tournament, you get a Porsche as well. So, I think there's been years where a player, a female player has been ranked like three in the world, gets a Porsche for playing and then wins the tournament and also gets a Porsche. So, you get two Porsches.”

“But as good as these guys are and as dominant as they are, they still pale in comparison to Rafa Nadal on Clay. I mean, how many times did Rafa go Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Roland Garos? Just swept the clay court season. He did that 35 times in a row. It's a joke. It's a joke. No one can hold a candle to Rafa on this surface and no one will ever even come close.”

“I think this is mostly about the big picture and the scheduleuling and being in the best possible prep for Roland Garos. I think um you know he's had injuries over the last few clay court seasons, hasn't he? I think a more serious one in 2024 that really was a worry. Um and he never played his best tennis really that clay court season and still ended up winning the French Open.”

“And the little thing they snuck in there is that Stan Winka is going to be getting a ceremony, which obviously means he's going to be getting a wild card because Yeah. Because it said a ceremony after his last match, you know. It wasn't just one that they were just going to do. I mean, can you imagine not giving him a wild card and then giving him a ceremony? No, they're not going to do that. They're going to give him a wild card.”

“I thought it was cool that maybe before the tournament they're interviewing Carlos and he acknowledged that he's going to lose the number one ranking at some point whether that was Monte Carlo at some point along the clay season. He knows basically he has too many points to defend. Sinner doesn't have any. That's kind that was like kind of cool. I thought I never remember like Rafer or Roger Novak like saying that.”

“Medvidev versus Ethan Quinn in round two. I think Quinn will really like the altitude. He's got a big serve. He's got a cannon off the forehand. This will be a throwback match. This is going to be someone who just looks at Denil Medvidev and says, If you're going to do that, then I'm just going to be a serve and volier. Call me Pat Rafter. Call me Taylor Dent. Call me Michael Yodra. I'm a serve volier now.”

“S's first serve percentage would be the worst it's been since the US Open. in this stretch of time where S has made 67% of his first serves over um I'll give you the number of matches over 47 matches he's made an average of 67% he had his worst performance of those 47 matches today in Monte Carlo against the only real peer he has on tour and he still won in straight sets. By the way, quick note, can you guess what the second worst percentage serve performance was for Yannik? That would be the ATP finals against Carlos Alcarez. So, the two times he's played Carlos, those have been his two lowest first serve percentage matches.”

“Stephanos sitsass who as we covered on our uh tennis relived show for friends yesterday was one match away from world number one in 2023 years ago. He's now down to 78 in the live rankings. He's below Marco Treneliti. It's it's a it's a really sad state of affairs currently for sitass and it doesn't it doesn't feel like this is the kind of hitting rock bottom before the inevitable before the inevitable rise back to somewhere near the top.”