Alcaraz vs de Minaur: Rotterdam Final

heavyweight forehands — north-south movement — defensive slice — serves

Carlos Alcaraz defeated Alex de Minaur 6/4 3/6 6/2 in the final of the ABN AMRO Rotterdam 500 on Sunday to clinch his first ever indoor title. It was the Spaniard’s sixth ATP 500 title and seventeenth career title (17-5 record in finals).

“I'll be a really good player on indoor courts, I'm sure about it.”

— Alcaraz in 2024

While I believe Alcaraz will be a really good player on indoor hard courts when all is said and done, the reality is that Rotterdam has been one of the slower indoor tournaments in recent years.¹ The commentators mentioned as much in the warm-up:

“It seems as if the conditions really suit him, going for his first indoor title, but for an indoor hard court these are relatively slow, quite grippy, you know, we’ve seen a lot of kick serves and heavy topspin on the forehand really working, time to use the drop shot, so he [Alcaraz] looks to really be enjoying the conditions.”

— Tennis TV

In the opening minutes Alcaraz showcased how explosive he is when things slow down, courtesy of a mistimed return.

He’d blasted more than 30 winners off that wing in his semifinal win over Hurkacz, and it’s the shot that often steers the fate of his matches.

A comparison of de Minaur’s flatter and eastern-gripped forehand with Alcaraz’s more semi-western and spin-oriented one showcases why the Spaniard has more of a heavyweight shot compared to his Australian opponent (a distinction that I also touched on with respect to Sinner’s versus de Minaur’s backhands in the 2023 Toronto final). From the slot position the Spaniard has got a longer path to swing out toward the ball, from a lower position relative to the ball, and with a more closed racquet face. More spin and more speed.

I tried to pause briefly in the setup and slot positions to showcase the differences. With respect to their initial setups, Alcaraz has the racquet head more upright and elbow lower relative to the hand and racquet head, in what I would call a more modern position reminiscent of Federer/Djokovic/Nadal. From here the racquet is aided by gravity to create speed and drops down and inside into the slot as the legs drive and the torso unwinds. By contrast, de Minaur has the elbow much higher, and the racquet head kept on the hitting side. He’s using the space between his elbow and his torso to create speed. His racquet drops some, but he also doesn’t get the racquet tip as far back as Alcaraz in the slot, so he is swinging less “in-to-out” and more “back-to-front”, which can work with his more conservative grip (Agassi was like this, although more compact still overall, and much stronger as an athlete). As they drop into the slot you can see how Alcaraz gets farther beneath the ball and with his strings still closed compared to de Minaur, who’s racquet face is already “on edge” or perpendicular to the court. These differences are what dictate much of the spin and speed data. (Note that these two shots are also hit with different intent. Alex had this higher ball from the middle of the court, so his intention was to hit it quite flat, which probably accentuates the flatness of his swing path and racquet face, but the general notion of their swing paths being different, with Alcaraz’s being steeper, more in-to-out, and longer, still holds).

These differences are what dictate much of the speed and spin data of players:

Arthur Fils was the king of speed and spin in 2024. He’s also got a huuuge backswing and gets a long way under and inside the ball. Source from Tennis Insights 2024.

Players like de Minaur (you could include Mannarino, Medvedev, and McDonald, who are other notable players in the bottom left of the chart) benefit from livelier balls and faster courts where they can almost ‘touch’ the ball and be aggressive, using their timing to create ball speed and aggression. Given the repeated criticism since Covid of balls becoming softer / fluffier / slower, swinging in-to-out with speed seems to confer an advantage in the current era of big hitters.

Despite the swing limitations, de Minaur has tried to beef up his body and his game, especially on serve and with the forehand, and the results have come accordingly in the last 12 months.

There’s that off-backhand generating the weak ball. Look how de Minaur’s forehand fades through the air. That’s what happens when you don’t swing in to out; you get sidespin, which has its perks on inside-out forehands and flat lasers like this, but they are harder to control and have lower margins of error.

But Alcaraz’s ground game is in a different weight class, and he was the aggressor in the opening set, rushing de Minaur for errors to obtain the early break, and then using his north-south movement to conjure shots like this:

de Minaur did well to get his backhand below the net here, but Alcaraz’s feel is the best on tour in these situations, and he came up trumps with this deft little backhand half volley.

But de Minaur would break back soon for 4-4, using his court speed and flat middle consistency to extract errors from the Spaniard, who tends to produce them in bunches. The Australian puts in more balls than nearly anyone, and has the wheels to back them up:

“de Minaur put 68 per cent of his first-serve returns in the court this season [2024], which is six percentage points higher than the Tour average of 62 per cent. De Minaur put an impressive 91 per cent of second-serve returns in the court, nine percentage points higher than the Tour average of 82 per cent.”

— atptour.com

As you might expect between the tour’s two premier returners, Alcaraz would answer right away, breaking at 4-4 off the back of a weak approach from the Aussie:

That slice from Alcaraz is really quite effective against a flat and underpowered hitter. It’s difficult for de Minaur to attack it with his flatter strokes compared to someone like a Sinner (or Alcaraz) who can wail on that kind of ball given they produce a lot more spin and racquet speed. De Minaur didn’t get the Spaniard outside the alley here, or hit it particularly deep, and it’s simply not enough pressure.

Alcaraz took the first set 6-4, but de Minaur got the perfect start in the second, breaking out to a 3-0 lead off the back of some loose Alcaraz backhands, and some exceptional ones of his own:

Great use of the left hand here to catch the side of the ball and hook it short crosscourt.

The serve and forehand improvements were also paying dividends:

But for all of the Demon’s improvements in his aggression, he still isn’t a big hitter, and Alcaraz’s ability to flip points was given numerous chances, like this gem of a two-shot pass at 30-30:

That’s a pretty great volley from Alex below the net there given how hard and low Alcaraz hit the backhand pass.

de Minaur would save that break point with another big serve-plus-one forehand, and would go on to hold courtesy of two more big first serves (the last of which was 211 km/h).

Serving for the set at 5-3, Alcaraz dropped back on second serves and played one of his trademark North-South return points:

Alcaraz has taken the defensive return position that became popular in the last ten years, and turned it into an offensive opportunity, taking a huge cut at the return, and then jumping on the next ball forward. Sinner is another who has adopted this return strategy at times.

Despite those impressive backhands, it was the shot that let Alcaraz down in the second set, spraying nine unforced errors from that wing for no winners (although that stat fails to account for how the above point was won largely with the backhand, not the final rudimentary volley). De Minaur would take it 6/3:

While the topspin backhand may have gone walkabout, the defensive slice backhand — a trademark of the Spaniard — made its appearance in the third set, feathering this below the net with remarkable feel from behind the TV scoreboard. De Minaur does admirably to run through his split step and take this volley closer to the net, but he played it a little too hard; it’s tough to take speed out of the ball while you’re sprinting forwards. But really, this point is over as soon as Carlos hit the slice well enough to dip it below the net and start his recovery forward. From there, it takes a phenomenal shot to out manoeuvre him.

“The beauty of the defensive slice, if played correctly, is that you can play it late — behind you, even — and still carve the outside of the ball crosscourt, as Alcaraz so often does” — 2024 Wrap

And it’s not only the passing shot aspect that he possesses. As he did against Shelton in last year’s Laver Cup match, Alcaraz has gifted feel on the defensive slice lob as well, seen here escaping with a win from this:

I really can’t emphasise enough just how freakish this ability is for a young Spanish two-hander raised on Murcian clay. Have we seen anyone recently with comparable feel on their slice? Sure, *Federer and Evans join the chat*, but those guys grew up slicing and defending and scrapping from that wing from young ages; their slices came stock along with their single-handers. Alcaraz has this shot perfected to such a degree despite it being an auxiliary to his two-handed backhand wing. In this regard he’s tennis’ version of a polymath, or Renaissance man, displaying an almost limitless skillset to an extremely high degree.

By comparison, this was de Minaur’s only attempt I could remember:

And de Minaur is no slouch with his slice and his touch/feel on the volley. But you can see there is a gulf in ability when stretched wide on the baseline like this. Alcaraz would make it, below the net, and often win the point.

A few points later Alcaraz held for 2-2, this time hitting a forehand defensive slice off a great counter backhand from de Minaur:

Alcaraz wouldn’t lose another game, as the Aussie’s level fell away, perhaps due to the illness he had been battling all week as well.

A look at the rap sheet:

While both men bled plenty of errors, I think this is more reflective of their court speed and ability to get balls back, as well as both men’s intent in this match to hold the baseline and pressure the other. It was close-quartered, frenetic, middleweight tennis. Still, the Alcaraz backhand did genuinely get loose at times in this match, and while such a compact swing may prove beneficial to his overall strategy of being ultra-offensive (he certainly looked relentless and Agassi-esque at times), it remains to be seen if it can stay consistent enough against the very best.

On another note, it’s still fascinating to me how the very best players — the ones already winning all the slams — seem to be the ones most open to change.

Sinner was testing blacked-out Head frames in October last year, after one of the greatest seasons of all time.

Alcaraz added weight to his frame, changed his backhand, and changed his serve technique after winning the Channel Slam last year.

Speaking of serve technique, despite de Minaur’s speed improvements, he is hitting against a technical ceiling he cannot overcome unless he changes it. So far he’s found improvements in beefing up the body, but he’s leaving plenty of technical muscle on the table. Here’s a comparison between the two (this video was taken in 2024, so this is Alcaraz’s old motion).

video source. A great library of slow motion pro strokes

These two screenshots were taken at the moment the leg drive was initiated, which you could say is the start of the serve swing in earnest (ground reaction forces start the swing). First of all, look at the different orientations of their bodies. Alcaraz is more turned away from the court with his hips, torso, and shoulders, meaning he can uncoil more when he drives his legs and right hip up and around. His leg drive is also much more balanced between the legs, whereas de Minaur is mainly using his left leg (an important driver of power in the serve is getting the right hip engaged, and being able to push off the back leg can help facilitate this). Then we can see the different hitting arm and racquet structures. Alcaraz’s shoulder is far more internally rotated, so he has more space to build speed as he externally rotates it, which helps create that stretch-shortening cycle as he internally rotates it into impact once more.

Here’s an excerpt from Technique Development in Tennis Stroke Production (emphasis added):

“The shoulder is the funnel for the transfer of energy from the trunk to the racket arm… The pause in changing racket direction from backswing to forward swing should be small to optimise the return of elastic energy to the concentric muscle contraction responsible for this forward motion.”

To make that pause smaller, you want more speed heading into the racquet change of direction.

The win puts Carlos within Masters striking distance of Zverev, and de Minaur’s efforts are rewarded with a return to his career high #6.

There are three 250s this week in Metz (indoor hard), Delray beach (outdoor hard), and Buenos Aires (outdoor clay) to kick off the Golden Swing.

I’ll be back with a recap next week. See you in the comments. HC.

1. Per the Tennis Abstract site: “uses ace rate — adjusted for the servers and returners in each match — to rate each tournament by surface speed. Thus, the number indirectly accounts for everything that influenced play: temperature, humidity, wind, balls, and of course the physical surface. Ratings greater than 1 are faster than average. For example, a rating of 1.25 indicates that the players hit 25% more aces than they would have on a tour-average surface.” Data from the last four years, with 2024 as the most recent: 1.24, 0.96, 0.99, 0.94.