At the end of 2023, Carlos Alcaraz He was celebrating a great year: six titles, including Wimbledon, and finalist at Roland Garros and Cincinnati. And yet, there was a wake-up call. «The but of this season is that since the US Open we have lowered the level a little and that aspect must be improved. You have to be more focused on being professional all the time: both what happens in those three hours on the track in training and the rest of the hours outside. There haven’t been that many tournaments, but there have been many games. And you have to understand that if you are very good you are going to play many of these games for a long time,” he said those days Juan Carlos Ferrero in a public criticism of that autumn blackout before putting the carrot and the hook: “It’s been twenty years and we know that you know it and that you are trying to improve it.” Ready to learn and improve, he was already trying to assimilate it verbally then: «Juanki is absolutely right: I have to learn that a tennis player’s season is from January to November. Maybe that was difficult for me to assimilate in the last part. That doesn’t end in August or September; “It goes until November.”
At the end of 2024, at 21 years old, he celebrates the title at Roland Garros, another Wimbledon and Olympic silver, and he has set out to demonstrate on the court that those words from 2023 permeated his progression. «I come here with the objective of winning. I want to add this title,” he explained, having just landed in Turin, always convinced that he can do it, that he has already shown that he has everything to achieve what he sets out to do. For tennis and for mentality: «I learned a lot this course. Some defeats were painful. I know myself more as a person and a player, what I need to do, inside and out. Not only do I have the objectives on the court, but also what I have to do on my off days, how many days I need before the tournaments to prepare as best as possible. That is, be professional in everything. Ferrero’s stick that he wants to turn into another virtue.
Another surface change
«Last year was a difficult end of the year for me. The last two games here were quite good but in the previous two and the three tournaments I did not play at my best level, so I realized that I had to change a little at this time of year, as I have done now,” he warned later. . Without forgetting that this November is long, because after Turin he has another goal and a big one: leading the Spanish team to win the Davis Cup. A major double challenge after eleven months of trouble.
The words, however, will have to be endorsed first this week at the Inalpi Arena. On another complex track to which he has to get used to the race after going through the hyper-fast Paris-Bercy with not very good feelings: he lost in the second round against Ugo Humbert amid complaints about the constant changes: «When I played the first game it came out the statistic that it was the fastest track on the circuit in Masters 1000. It’s crazy. “I don’t know why they have changed so much from one tournament to another.”
A short adaptation phase that also paid off in the last Masters Cup. To try to alleviate the harshness of the conditions, Ferrero installed last year’s Turin track at the Villena headquarters. “I’ve heard that she’s slower than last year, but she’s still pretty fast,” Daniil Medvedev warned after losing to Taylor Fritz.
But Alcaraz knows that he has to abstract himself from all that, because the land is the same for everyone and what depends on it is in his hands. He has had high-level training although he has not been able to win any of the sets against his tournament partners: Zverev beat him 6-3, Medvedev 7-5 and Fritz 6-4. Yesterday it was the Brazilian Juan Carlos Prado Angelo, 19, who dared to be his ‘sparring’. Although they have only been two years apart, Alcaraz is now the reference to learn from, while he continues at it.
To become even bigger, he vigorously pursues this Cup similar to a Grand Slam and which has had so much difficulty among the Spanish. Its place at the end of the calendar, the fast surface and the compressed indoor game have always complicated the company and Manuel Orantes (1976), Álex Corretja (1998) and Garbiñe Muguruza (2021) remain the only “masters”.
Today he begins the path to the feat he longs for against Casper Ruud (25 years old and 7th in the world), whom he has beaten in the four previous events (not before 2:00 p.m., Movistar+); in night session, at 8:30 p.m.: Zverev-Rublev.
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