Sinner's mechanical excellence malfunctions against human ingenuity of relentless rival

The Guardian

5 hours ago

By the end, it felt cruel to want more. Look at the state of these men: bedraggled and dishevelled, dragged into a place of wildness and madness, of mental atrophy and physical dismay. You, on the other hand, have spent the last five and a half hours sitting on your couch, eating snacks and gorging on the finest sporting theatre. You want this prolonged for your entertainment? You want more of this? And of course the only real answer is: yes. Yes, please.
Twilight zone at Roland Garros. Two sets each, six games each: the shadows ravenous, the noise bestial, every thrill laced with a kind of sickness. By the end, admiration began to meld with pity. Pity for their teams and families, trapped in the convulsions, feeling a spiralling hypertension with every passing moment. Pity for the tennis balls, being smacked and beaten mercilessly across the Paris night. Pity for the watching Andre Agassi, who you could swear had hair when this match started.
And ultimately, with one scream and one shrug, pity for Jannik Sinner, for whom it will be no consolation at all to have lost one of the greatest matches ever played on the crushed brick of Paris. Neither he nor Carlos Alcaraz had lost any of their grand slam finals. Sinner had never won over more than four hours. Alcaraz had never come back from two sets down.
What followed was a match that took them, and us, and very possibly the sport of tennis itself, to new and giddy places. Perhaps the snapshot that best illustrated this came an hour and a half earlier, with Alcaraz perched at the baseline, facing three championship points.
For four long and ragged sets, he had thrown everything against the world No 1. He tried giving his groundstrokes a little more air. He tried hitting lower and flatter. He tried breaking up the rhythm. He tried smearing clean winners to wrench back the momentum. He tried stepping up on the Sinner serve. He had unleashed every part of his game, and still found himself playing somebody else's.
Because to watch Sinner at his best is like watching a hydraulic excavator very methodically demolishing a bridge. The techniques and the instructions are drilled to flawlessness. The sense of immense power is almost irresistibly effortless. Every movement is timed and calibrated, every tool the perfect implement for its job. And as Sinner stood on the verge of victory, the job appeared to be done.
But of course there are some jobs that cannot be done by machine. And for all the flaws and blemishes in Alcaraz's game, what he brings is a very human ingenuity: the sense that however deeply you analyse him, however well you can read his intentions, you can never know for sure, because no two situations are ever the same. Tennis is a game of repeatable skills but it is also a game of moments that exist entirely in their own time, of human will and human feelings and human choices.
And so the three errors that Sinner makes on championship point are unforced errors, but entirely human errors, a product of this moment and this opponent. For Sinner is of course not a machine, as became so painfully evident in that fifth set. Here the margins began to fray. Here the brutal thudding forehands that had previously just cleared the net were now clipping it. Here he railed angrily at his box. Even a crucial line call at 30-30 in the 10th game went against him, the ball over an inch out but called good.
For obvious reasons Sinner will never be as lavishly adored by crowds as Alcaraz: the less reserved of the two, the more emotionally available of the two, the only one of the pair not to have failed a doping control. For all this there remains a deeply admirable quality to him, so evident in that fifth set when Alcaraz taunted him with drop shot after drop shot. Forlornly, Sinner kept chasing them down, kept falling short, a man utterly and spellbindingly committed to his mission, even if it took every last drop of effort out of his body.
And of course this is the stuff of which great sport is made, of which great theatre is made, of which great rivalries are made. Perhaps this was the game that truly buried the Big Three era, even if Novak Djokovic is still puffing along on his last fumes. These two have now won the past six majors between them. The only player to beat Sinner on the ATP Tour since last August is Alcaraz. The only man to take a set off him in Paris was Alcaraz.
Naturally there will be an irresistible tendency, as there always is, to draw out the contrasts in this particular rivalry, to set Sinner and Alcaraz against each other like wrestlers, hero and heel, poles apart. But these are players defined more by what they share: a murderous ambition, a taste for the spectacular, the never-ending quest for perfection on a tennis court. You want more of this? How about another decade?