Alcaraz Knocked Out of US Open 2nd Rd by Van de Zandschulp

instead of getting stronger mentally I took some steps back in that aspect this is what Carlos Alara said after losing in the second round of the 2024 US Open to btic Fan desan sculp how is it possible that someone that wins Roland garos and Wimbledon back to back and gets a silver medal at the Olympics can say that can have problems at the mental level shouldn't his confidence be Skyhigh while tennis is a very complex sport it's an individual sport and I'm sure Carlos and his team are scratching their heads right now looking for Solutions because since playing the Olympics Carlos has not played well in fact he played two of the worst matches that I've ever seen him play losing to m in Cincinnati Carlos himself said that was the worst match that he's ever played and yesterday's match especially in that first set was some of the worst tenners that I've seen Carlos play but before I share my opinion on why Carlos is struggling I'm going to talk about btic and I'm going to draw some comparisons between the two see BK jumped on the scene in 2021 by reaching the quarterfinals of the US Open from the qualies where he lost to medev this result took him into the top 100 he went as high as 35 in the world and BK made his first ATP final in Munich on Clay last year Munich is a cayore tournament that takes place a week after Monte Carlo and in this tournament he faced hulga Runa and this is is not the current version of hogar Runa this was a hogar Runa that was on fire who had just made the Monte Carlo final a week prior by beating medev and Center back to back and losing to rublev 75 and a third and he started strong in this final winning the first set comfortably but then BK turned it on and I was so impressed with this player not only is he a power player can hit the ball extremely hard he serves well can come to the net and most impressively he has exceptional movement for a guy with a bigger build so both won that second set 6-1 and continued to play well and was up 52 in the third two breaks and Runa at that time in the match was in tank mode there was something hurting and he mentally checked out of the match and when BK was serving at 15 love 52 up in the third Runa played a tank mode Point BK had come to the net and Runa could have easily hit a forehand passing shot but he decided to turn around and do one of those tweener shots so not off a lob completely unnecessary show shot and somehow Runa ends up winning this point and then starts to try he started to play a lot most seriously after that point but nevertheless BK wins the next two points is up 405 has two match points on his own serve of 52 in the third he loses that first match point and something weird happened where boik looked up into the stands to Paul harus and made a negative gesture and I thought this was weird because he was in complete control of the match in fact he only needed one more point to win the match but he didn't he lost the second match point lost his serve Runa holds BK loses his serve again at 5-4 serving for the match again then at five all boik breaks Runa serve and is serving for the match a third time and is again up 4015 with two match points cannot convert at this moment in time Runa is playing exceptional tennis and ends up winning this match 76 in the third now look Munich is only a 250 level tournament but it's a very prestigious tournament held at the if itos Club in Munich where the winner gets a BMW so this meant a lot to BK and this affected him very negatively and this is what's so tough about tennis there he was dominating a top 10 player in the world in a final of an ATP tournament but after that tournament btic did not win a single match on clay and in fact did not win a single match on the ATP Tour until Wimbledon where he won the first round and lost in a second and the poor performances continued all the way to yesterday's match against Carlos where botic was unable to win back-to-back matches at the ATP level in 201 24 yes he did come through some qualifying draws he did win matches at the Challenger level but at the ATP level he did not win back-to-back matches all year so it is clear that losing meaningful matches independent of the level of the tournament because tournaments and matches are going to have a different meaning to each individual idual player but this is something that's very difficult to get out of a player's head when you had the victory so close to your one point away and you let it slip so what happened to boik at the US Open well he said it after the match he felt confident why because he beat Dennis aalv in the first round which is not an easy win by any means and he stepped on the court against Carlos alcaras possibly with nothing to lose there was no pressure on him and he played the greatest match that he's ever played played see a lot of people picked Carlos to win the US Open I didn't I picked CER I did pick Carlos to go to the semifinals I expected Carlos to have a little bit of a slump post the Olympics but I did not expect the slump to be this extreme caros was asked whether the loss against jokovic in the Olympic final affected him negatively and caros said no so it could be the fact that this is just a normal slump that every great player goes through we don't have to single out Carlos for this l we can compare this loss to Rafa losing to Brown in Wimbledon feder losing to stovsky in Wimbledon or Joko losing to istan at the Australian Open so losses like this can't happen but to me the fact that he had two shock losses back to back and also the fact that he didn't play well against two in that first round there could be some lingering effect of letting that Olympic final slip because if you remember Carlos had chances in that match that match featured no breaks of serves and caros had a ton of break chances in that first set he was emotionally affected by that match after all he cried in an interview with Alex Keta after the match so this loss hurt a lot so I think we're looking at two things a lingering effect of losing that final to jokovic and also an expected slump after winning French Open and wimbl them back to back see the thing with Carlos is the following he is a Showman at heart he loves to play like this in my opinion Carlos could benefit tremendously from playing all his matches on court 18 okay because I think he could be unbeatable if he doesn't play in front of a big crowd because once Carlos is in front of a big crowd he likes to entertain so when everything is going his way and no problem he can be the showman and win matches however when he's not playing well we have seen examples of Carlos playing low percentage tennis and that was certainly the case yesterday caros was unable to extend the rally something that he did really well in Indian Wales where he turned his season around and also turned around the half of the 2023 season that was poor post Cincinnati and Indian Wells he was able to recover his form by putting more height on the ball putting more spin on his back end and his forehand extending the rally changing up his shots but yesterday in the first set he was going low and hard and he missed a tremendous this amount of balls into the net he was also shanking balls this is another thing that we see from Carlos where when his game is off he has a tendency to shank some forehands so I've said this before Carlos can benefit tremendously from playing less exciting tennis and more boring tennis and he should learn from Novak jokovic who plays some of the most boring night session matches ever these are not exciting matches because Novak is all business he wins in straight sets there's nothing exciting going on other than Novak's regular game and this is not a dis on Nook this is exactly how you want to play the matches the crowd pleasing when you're not on the top of your game can work against you and you can find yourself losing sets to players where you shouldn't so to be fair in yesterday's match yes Carlos played a horrible first set but then in the second set he did play better but unfortunately BK was playing out of his mind and caros said in the postmatch interview that he was looking for BK to give him some free points and he just didn't BK played and exceptional match Carlos put himself in a hole that he wasn't able to get out of because even when he turned up his game in sets two and three he was still committing a lot of unforced errors on crucial points and again the type of unforced errors that he was making were low percentage shots hitting the ball very low and hard where the probability of missing is extremely high so to me the solution for Carlos is simple he needs to play more like jokovic as far as the Showmanship is concerned and be all business and not care so much about entertaining the crowd and as far as his tennis he needs to play more like Rafa and extend the rallies make the matches more physical he's going to get his looks to be aggressive and dominate the other players but especially in matches where his confidence is low and when he's not playing well extending the rally makes a lot of sense not only for Carlos but for every tennis player when you're making high percentage shots your confidence grows and then when you do pull the trigger the likelihood of your shots going in is going to be much higher