Carlos Alcaraz sends a thunderclap across the French Open in rout of Tommy Paul

New York Times

2 days ago

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — Carlos Alcaraz had himself a loud night in Paris.
On a day when his opponent, Tommy Paul was hampered with injuries to his abdomen and leg, Alcaraz reminded the world just how immaculate his tennis can be when it's on.
After a week of matches that were sort of meh, by his standards anyway, Alcaraz put on a display of finesse, drop shots and sprinting forehands that probably no one could have touched. There were dominant numbers all across the stat sheet. He served at nearly 80 percent for much of the night. He won 87 percent of the points when he was serving.
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He doubled Paul's point total. He won half the points on Paul's first serve. He didn't allow a break point and was done in 94 minutes, 6-0, 6-1, 6-4.
The number were absurd, but what was really silly was the sound of the ball hitting his strings that echoed through Court Philippe-Chatrier. From 250 feet away it sounded like a sledge hammer crashing into a spike to split a log. From 150 feet away it sounded like that log was splitting right next to your ear.
'I could close my eyes and everything went in,' Alcaraz, who said he has been practicing with them shut of late, said in his on-court interview. The sound could have painted a picture of its own.
That's not how the thwop-pop percussion of a tennis match is supposed to sound. When Alcaraz is on he doesn't need to try to play supposed-to tennis. So he doesn't. He turns the tennis court into an experiment lab.
Lace a forehand down the line on a dead run from 10 feet behind the baseline? Sure, why not. Turn a searing forehand from an opponent around with a feathery drop shot from the back of the court? No problem. Take dead aim at the postage stamp knowing that a miss might be flying so fast the other guy won't catch up to it anyway? Sure thing. It's cool making a guy in the top 10 whiff.
This Alcaraz hasn't been around all that much of late. He appeared in Rome when his chief rival, Jannik Sinner was on the other side of the net in the final. But since his arrival at Roland Garros, he has spent long stretches of matches trying to find the form he found in the Parisian dusk Tuesday, when very quickly the only question was who would fall first, Paul or the night. Paul lost that one, as Alcaraz cracked a running forehand across the court and then laced another inside-in.
He dropped sets in three of his first four matches. Against Ben Shelton in the fourth round, he was lucky not to drop two, saving set points in the first-set tiebreak. Damir Džumhur nearly pushed into a fifth set after Alcaraz won the first two in their third-round tussle that somehow stretched for nearly three-and-a-half hours. Džumhur lifted his level close to the one Alcaraz reached against Paul, but Alcaraz also let him do it.
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'Trying not to go down, let him into the match again,' Alcaraz said of how he kept Paul from the door in the third set.
Sometimes though, all it takes is 90 minutes of scintillating tennis to put all that in what feels like the distant past. Alcaraz, a four-time Grand Slam champion at 22, is in another Grand Slam semifinal. He's a match away from a likely showdown with Sinner on a surface that the Italian is still trying to master.
All of a sudden, he's playing like … that.