Hapless, helpless and humiliated … there’s only one major where the grass is greener for Demon
The shell-shocked Alex de Minaur is heading to next week’s Davis Cup tie in Sweden and a place he knows all too well. The drawing board.
Alex de Minaur is a man 133 years after his time. The glittering annual shindig and coat-and-tie occasion known as The Championships at Wimbledon has become the only major played on grass. What a crying, counterpunching shame for de Minaur. He might’ve been unstoppable in 1891: even the French Open was played on a manicured lawn.
Grass is his best surface. His finest Australian Opens could’ve been conjured between 1905 and 1987, starting at the Warehouseman’s Cricket Ground and finishing at Kooyong, when turf was the surface of choice, rewarding the hitters of a flat, skidding ball, like de Minaur, before the national broadsheet and championship went tabloid and moved to Melbourne Park and Rebound Ace. Hardcourts and clay aren’t his greatest go, and the frightful thrashing from Jannik Sinner on Wednesday reinforced the notion that it’s probably Wimbledon or nothing in his quest for a slam.
The shell-shocked de Minaur is heading to next week’s Davis Cup tie in Sweden and a place he knows all too well: the drawing board. His win/loss record against Sinner has become 10 and oh no.
“It’s been too many times playing him and seeing the same thing,” he said after his straight-sets shellacking on fright night at Rod Laver Arena. “I’m not even surprised anymore when I face him. Matches like these happen. With the conditions a little bit slower and a little bit later at night, it’s pretty tough to make him miss or hurt him. He was bloody good tonight.”
Hardcourts can be slick and helpful to de Minaur during the day, when the weather’s hot, but they slow at night, when big finals are always contested, which plays into the hands of Sinner. It was a soul-destroying defeat. A scoreline so gruesome you don’t want to repeat it in front of the children. De Minaur was hapless, helpless, humiliated, shattered.
“I’m going to be completely honest and transparent,” he said. “It’s tough going out there and playing someone like Jannik … I think he’s probably my worst matchup. You can see it in the head-to-head. In these types of conditions it’s even tougher. You go out there, you compete, you try everything, you bring every sort of different look that you can. But when it’s a little bit colder and you can’t really get the ball out of his strike zone, he can just unload and not miss. If we’re playing middle of the day on a stupidly hot day, that’s when you can see some errors come out, and that’s when you probably see Jannik not play at his best. But conditions like tonight, it’s tough to rattle him.”
Tell the kids to look away. I’ll whisper it quickly. The score was 6-3 6-2 6-1. Eek. All that was left of de Minaur was a chalk outline.
“He’s built this aura up,” de Minaur said. “You know it’s going to be a battle, it’s going to be tough, but then you’re an hour-and-thirty in, you’re struggling to win games. You’re trying to find ways to just get on the board. It’s pretty surreal.”
No shame in losing to Sinner. He’s unreal. Still, de Minaur wasn’t remotely in the hunt. Rod Laver Arena groaned with disappointment. You could hear a pin drop. The sounds of silence.
“The crowd wants me to go out there, make it competitive, try to make it into a match – and I’m trying my best,” de Minaur said.
“It’s frustrating that I can’t do it. He comes out of the blocks in the sets so well. Whenever we played, it feels like the first three games, four games, he gets the early break and then all of a sudden we never really end up getting to the later stages of sets, where all of a sudden you can have scoreboard pressure, and all of a sudden the rallies can get a little bit tense, and I can ask more questions and get the crowd involved. I don’t want to leave like this.”
De Minaur did well to reach the quarter-finals but in truth, he didn’t hit great heights by his standards. Wimbledon last year was the best tennis I’ve seen him play. Right before injury made him forfeit his quarter-final to Djokovic. He was underdone in Melbourne. Instead of getting down and dirty at the Brisbane and/or Adelaide Internationals – real tournaments – he played just quick singles matches at the United Cup against Britain’s world No.125 Billy Harris and Argentina’s world No.39 Tomas Martin Etcheverry. When Olivia Gadecki and the mixed doubles players performed poorly, Australia missed the finals and de Minaur was left high and dry, entering the Open with only two matches under his belt in as many weeks.
Skip the United Cup in future? “That’s a great question,” he said. “Ultimately, I would have loved to play a couple more matches the first week of the year. The way it fell, it didn’t come. Wasn’t meant to be. What is probably not ideal is that in the United Cup you can go out there and have a great two matches, but you’re very much dependent on your team. It can work both ways. You cannot play well and your team takes you through, or the other way around. It’s tough when you don’t get through the group stage. It’s probably something I’m going to have to look back and think about.”
To the Davis Cup tie at Stockholm’s Royal Tennis Hall from January 31, where Australia takes on a team featuring Leo Borg, son of Bjorn. “The whole country wanted me to do well and I wanted to do well here,” de Minaur said on his way out the door. “The negative is after playing some great tennis on home soil, and gaining so much, you feel like you’ve just been slapped across the face, to be honest. I’ll survive. I’ll keep improving. I just need to sit with my team and figure out a way to hurt Jannik on the court. It’s back to the drawing board, like I’ve done my whole career. I still don’t think this is my ceiling. I’ve got more in the tank. I’ll be searching for that.”
Will de Minaur win a major? “I mean, it’s pretty tough right now for me to sit here after this defeat and tell you I believe I can go all the way,” he says. “But saying that, I do think there are opportunities out there. Tennis is so much about match-ups. Right now my worst matchup on tour is probably Jannik. There’s a head-to-head that doesn’t lie. If I’m in a different side of the draw, different little section, then who knows? I genuinely think I’m going to give myself opportunities, and I don’t think my peak is making quarter-finals in a slam. I see other players that have made it further, made semis, made finals, and I do believe I can be among them. If they’ve been able to accomplish that, then why not me?”
Well …
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