No more surprises about Tsitsipas from my side. The guy is a one-surface player (no matter the AO final), and all the stars have to align for him to play his best tennis.
Yes, a talented player - but with incredible swings in consistency. Same as most other top 10 players - Rune was last year's finalist and is already out of the tournament.
That's not how these guys will be able to challenge Alcaraz, currently he's on a highway to stardom due to the lack of serious competition.
For any player to challenge Alcaraz, they will have to be playing the best tennis of their life on any given day. They cannot just need to have the stars aligned and have the best luck in their life to play the best tennis if they want to actually beat Alcatraz. They will have to perform whenever they are asked to. Tsitsipas is definitely struggling a little when he is asked to perform well against big players regularly.
Surprises were part of tennis and this is one of the match. There is expectation from Tsitsipas and this time things didn't work well. Play three tie breaker set could've made both of the players get tired, because everything went close from the beginning. Only the final set had a better lead. Dominic Stricker who made a great win doesn't perform in a consistent manner in the next match which is the disappointment from these players.
It seems that this year has not been a good year for Tsitsipas' career, this year he has only won 1 title atp the 250 tournament, and Yesterday's match was a very balanced match, and the third set when he managed to excel did not continue to watch this match because I thought he would have easily taken the fourth set, but the final score presented something else.
Next up is Stricker who will face the unseeded players as well and I think it will be a tough match too, if he manages to keep up his form maybe he'll be the one to make it back to the next round
And the latest surprise was Casper Ruud losing to the unseeded tennis player from China Zhang Zhizhen, in the fourth set when Ruud managed to win the set without giving his opponent a chance to get even 1 game, it seemed like it would be easy for him to get the fifth set, but in the fifth set, Casper Ruud looked very frustrated and failed. This is his bad record because he was a finalist last year, and Zhang Zhizhen is a pretty good player and he has weapons when facing top players.
The last match was definitely very close. First of all I thought he was definitely going to win the match before the match even started. But towards the end of the match, I definitely started having some doubts. The match did go on for a long long time. I actually did not think that tsitsipas will actually faced so many problems trying to win this match, let alone losing it.
Tsitsipas match was not that surprising, but Rudd match was definitely a surprise. And I saw a person talking in this thread that these players do need a lot of luck to perform consistently. This is not an indication of great players to be honest.