TRACK H2H

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”