Alexander Zverev has solved his first task at the French Open without any problems. But he doesn’t want to look too far ahead.
Last week Alexander Zverev took another quick break. At home in Monte Carlo, the 21-year-old tennis star met up with a few friends, they sailed across the Mediterranean on a boat, casually killing time: “It was good not to have seen a tennis racket,” says Zverev.
Tough days, enormous competition stress lay behind him, he won the tournament in Munich, he won the Masters in Madrid. And then he also reached the final at the Masters in Rome, unhappily losing to Rafael Nadal, the clay court king. What now lies ahead of him are even more difficult, but perhaps highly lucrative weeks, at the French Open in Paris.
No less than a breakthrough at Grand Slam level is expected for Zverev at the Roland Garros Stadium festivities, the highlight of the annual sand court campaign in world tennis. The opening match was brilliant, promising for Zverev: Zverev played a sparkling clean match with confidence against Ricardas Berankis from Lithuania, declassifying his opponent weightlessly easily 6:1, 6:1 and 6:2 in just 69 minutes.
Most of the nerves of the Germans were still spent waiting for the long time on Court Suzanne Lenglen, who then resembled a training match for long stretches. Zverev will now play either Tscechen Jiri Vesely or Serb Dusan Lajovic on Wednesday.
Of course, the view is even further ahead, at best until the Sunday after next: Would the dream final between Nadal, the number 1 on the seed list, and Zverev, the number 2, take place – a re-run of the dramatic Roman final, in which Zverev had already led 3-1 in the third set, before a break from the rain thwarted all his cup dreams? “I don’t think that far ahead,” says Zverev, “I have to concentrate on every single task.”
Zverev, the celestial striker in the tennis universe, does not yet have the slightest reason to be overly ambitious with the majors. And too much to expect. That’s exactly what had become his downfall in the last two years, also in Paris last year, where he failed as Rome Champion in the first round due to the savvy Spaniard Fernando Verdasco.
Since then, however, Zverev’s game has once again experienced a marked increase, he seems calmer, more balanced and calmer overall. The hot-headed failures have become rare, and Zverev is actually currently playing the way Juan Carlos Ferrero, the coach he hated in the spring, had demanded: disciplined, orderly, ambitious – but not acrimonious and misled in his task.
“Maybe Sascha will manage to find the same rhythm at a Grand Slam that he manages at the other big tour competitions,” says Boris Becker, head of the DTB’s men’s tennis department. On the fringes of the Munich tournament, Becker had called the third in the world rankings a “diamond” that “still needs to be cut”.
Zverev’s previous clay court adventures this season have taken their toll. Therefore, the question will be whether energy and power will suffice for the two-week gruelling battles in the red sand – just once again on the home stretch, when the Roland Garros matches tend to become even more dramatic and produce more wear and tear.
Zverev’s first major test would come in the quarter-finals against his buddy Dominic Thiem – the Austrian is the only rival who has been able to beat Matador Rafael Nadal on clay this season (in Madrid). The next round might be against Novak Djokovic, who has regained strength again, and then against the high favourite Nadal in the final.
“Pure theory. And dreams of the future,” says Zverev. After all the Grand Slam setbacks so far, an advance into the second week would be an “important partial success” for him. No matter how the rest of the world sees it.