For his first match at the Masters (he withdrew last year for this end-of-season meeting), Carlos Alcaraz did not rediscover the flame of his best months of 2023. The Spaniard, who sometimes had struggling to find his rhythm in this match, was dominated in three sets by Alexander Zverev (6-7 [3], 6-3, 6-4) and had a poor start to his last campaign of the season. The German takes the lead in the red group before the duel between Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev on Monday evening (9 p.m.).
Broken early, Alcaraz seemed to find his inner fire in the wake of a point that resembled him with cavalcades at every end and a sumptuous lob to conclude the point (see below). He picked up the score a few moments later (3-3) and took this duel into his own hands, even if he was still just a bit short. Three first set points on Zverev’s serve were not enough but the Spaniard dominated the decisive game before offering himself a break point at the start of the second act.
Alcaraz not always serene in his choices
He did not convert this opportunity, and the outcome was much more difficult. Not completely serene in his choices – we often saw him get annoyed by pointing in the opposite direction from the corner where he had just played his ball – he gradually lost the thread and the score against a very constant Zverev on his service games (three shutouts in the exercise in this second set). Perhaps the most revealing of the state of Alcaraz at the end of the season, he was sometimes overtaken by the German, who stuck to a set everywhere.
Even the small alert for Zverev, who fell after blocking his left foot and who had to scare himself after his traumatic injury at Roland-Garros 2022, was not enough to reverse the dynamic of this meeting. With the break in hand, the German just procrastinated when serving for the match and conceded a break point. But he erased it on his sixteenth and final ace of the afternoon before celebrating his victory. It’s his first this year against Alcaraz, who dominated him in Madrid and the US Open. But the Spaniard, crowned at Wimbledon this summer, then had another face.
