NEW YORK – The fourth day of the US Open ended with the biggest surprise of the tournament: Carlos Alcaraz exited in the second round of the last Grand Slam of the year. ‘Mentally I’m not well, I’m not strong. I don’t know how to deal with problems, I don’t know how to handle them,’ he said.
The 6-1, 7-5, 6-4 loss to Dutchman Botic van Zandschulp made him look vulnerable. The Spaniard failed to hit winners in the first set and throughout the match his forehand was off-track. Smiles were just few and far between, and frustration set in when he couldn’t get his head up.
“It was a fight against myself. Today I played against my opponent and also against myself in my head. There were a lot of emotions that I couldn’t handle,” he admitted afterwards at the press conference.
Alcaraz’s recovery never came and the faces of his team said it all. Juan Carlos Ferrero, his coach; Albert Molina, his manager; and David Ferrer, Spain’s Davis Cup captain, all showed the sense of unease. There were not many answers coming from his box that could get the 2022 champion out of the maze in which he was getting lost.
He will not equal Rod Laver and Rafael Nadal, who in 1969 and 2008 respectively won Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open. They are the only two men to do so in the same season.
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Thus, Alcaraz leaves the North American tour of the second half of the year with a negative record. The loss to van Zandschulp at the Arthur Ashe comes on top of the loss to Gael Monfils in the Cincinnati opener, which he himself described as ‘the worst match’ of his life.
‘I’ve taken steps backwards in terms of my head and I don’t understand why. I came from a spectacular summer, after Roland Garros and Wimbledon I came out of there feeling that I had advanced, that my head was solid,’ confessed the world number three.
It was there in Ohio that the much publicised destruction of his racquet took place, something for which he later apologised. Perhaps in the noisy stadium of Queens it would have been good for him to let off steam, to see if he could change the constant murmur of the court for the intense shouts of the New York crowd.
Not so for Alcaraz, and thanks to his unrecognisable version he was unable to extend to 16 consecutive Grand Slam wins. He will be sitting on a plane home sooner than expected. He will have time perhaps to play golf and reset his mind: ‘I arrived in New York with less energy than I expected’.
Valencia is waiting to welcome him and the Spanish Davis Cup team after a week’s holiday that was not on his calendar.
