Alcaraz vs Sinner: Beijing Final Recap

TikTok tennis — return-and-volley — forehands — defensive backhands

This is late and Shanghai is well underway, but I figure it’s always worthy covering this matchup, however brief.

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Carlos Alcaraz fought back from 0-3 in the third-set tiebreaker to defeat defending champion Jannik Sinner 6/7 6/4 7/6 in the final of the Beijing ATP500 on Wednesday. Alcaraz now leads Sinner 6-4 in their budding rivalry.

State of the Art

It’s hard to know whether the level of tennis is better now compared to 10 or 15 years ago. I’ve often felt that hedge fund manager John Hussman’s quip of the market “going nowhere in an interesting way” is a possible description. Prime Big-3 may still be tennis’ litmus test, but there is no denying that Alcaraz and Sinner are playing a version of the game that certainly gets one to sit up and take notice. Jimmy Connors’ grandfather once told him that “tennis was boxing at 90 feet”. Well, now it’s more like 70 feet. And the gloves are off. And both guys are dual-wielding Desert Eagles. The mood board is martial and instinctive. Every swing is infused with a premeditated shoot-to-kill intent, save for the forced-defense they naturally create for each other. “Neutral balls” aren’t really in their lexicon. You have to go back to something like Agassi / Sampras to get a similar incendiary vibe — Pete’s aggression forced Agassi’s aggression which created a self-feeding loop of aggression. But there are moments when Carlos and Jannik produce their best tennis, and what ensues is a PlayStationesque melange of speed, variation, and skill that is worthy of the TikTok’d algorithms that catch our attention. The “peaks” that bubble over in these instances may have never been higher.

Such a brand of tennis has resulted as youngsters grew up playing with lighter and stiffer racquets and polyester strings that enabled them to play closer to the baseline without sacrificing racquet speed. Alcaraz reportedly uses an off-the-shelf Babolat Pure Aero VS at 305 grams unstrung. Sinner’s Head Speed isn’t much heavier at ~310 grams unstrung. Compared to the lead-wrapped frames of yesterday, these figures are childish; plastic playthings. But the ball speeds are anything but. One is reminded that C4 is a plastic.

Such knife-weighted tools also mean players can take swaggering steps into the court and downright disrespect well-struck incoming balls. Alcaraz especially employed a premeditated forehand approach to pressure Sinner throughout the encounter. This Sinner backhand lands decently deep, but is slashed away on the rise with a smooth right-right hop from Alcaraz.

“Alcaraz and Sinner moved forward to finish the point at the front of the court more than 100 times in the final, with over half of those points not involving a volley.”

— Craig O’Shannessy for atptour.com

It was Alcaraz who ventured forward more often, and rather than bringing back serve-and-volley, it seems the modern hard court game is heading toward a theme of return-and-volley. I noted such a play from Holger Rune in his Brisbane final loss to Dimitrov earlier this year. It makes sense, given that contemporary greats are defined by their forehands, backhands, and movement, more than their serves and shoe-lace volleys. And what better shot to approach on than a guaranteed short ball cloaked in the swing of a second-serve? Alcaraz came forward eleven times on the return — ten coming off his backhand — and only missed one of them, winning a hugely successful 8/11 points.

Alcaraz has a very compact backhand that is tailored for taking high balls flat and early, just like this. This kind of second-serve play is only going to get more popular on hard courts. It’s the first guaranteed short and high ball in a rally, and you catch your serving opponent stuck inside the baseline as they recover from the serve. Note how Sinner is split-stepping backwards as Alcaraz makes contact here. A well struck-return is incredibly difficult to handle, especially when you consider how accomplished Alcaraz is as a volleyer. The only way to counteract someone successfully doing this is to go bigger on your second serve — a trend that has already been underway for some years.

Sinner himself, a baseline heavyweight, also made efforts to venture forward — 39 of them to be exact (although none occurred on the return of serve; one of the subtle distinctions between the pair within their aggressive playstyle-meta).¹ Such a play is often a winning strategy when reckoned in the post-match numbers. After all, how does one counteract someone hitting the ball early and heavy and accurately? It’s almost checkmate, but one of the remaining tactical slivers — the vestigial slice backhand — has proven a subtle method of escape for Alcaraz, who again used it in this match to great effect. Of course, the Spaniard has had to weld it onto the speed, flexibility and balance of his rubber-smoked movement, and I count only one other man on tour who could lay claim to such mastery of shot.²

There’s a lot of subtle reasons this low crosscourt slice is a boon to players who can play it against an approaching opponent. Firstly, there’s more reach when you take your left hand off, but you can also hit it slower than a two-hander, so it buys Carlos more time to recover. Furthermore, you can feather it to land shorter in the court than a two-hander, and this then forces your opponent to often halt their forward movement, and maybe even backup, to hit it after the bounce.

Again Alcaraz gets the slice low (this time played off his left leg as well, which is rarer, and something Sinner does more often) forcing Sinner to sacrifice his racquet speed for spin to lift the approach shot over the net. It buys Alcaraz enough time to then play a neat little backhand dink that again got below the net. This ability to get his passing shots low just kills his opponents net conversion on otherwise very good approaches.

The most impressive — and optimistic — thing about this trend toward forecourt aggression is that it hasn’t really come at the expense of groundstroke excellence for these two. Both have incredible forehands that are blends of modern and nextgen swings that had the AI-data spitting out approving figures in the first set, but it was the Alcaraz forehand that dictated much of this match, smacking 32 winners and a bunch of forced errors more.

I took no data-driven notes of my own for this encounter, but my feeling was that Alcaraz was generally trying to rush and approach the Sinner backhand, often using that premeditated front foot forehand to drive the ball early. You can see how it’s difficult for Sinner to wash enough speed out of the ball and get it low at Alcaraz when the Italian hits his two-hander. Here it allows Alcaraz to play an aggressive stab volley high off his rib cage, which he played again into the backhand before swatting away the final putaway on top of the net.

Sinner would have been better served trying to hit his initial backhand ball softer and shorter

Sinner’s end-range ability to inject pace and depth is kind of his undoing when Alcaraz is moving forward like this. The Italian has Djokovic’s reach and depth to a large degree — just look at this return below! — and the ensuing sliding backhand would have reset a baseline point against all but Carlos, who’s enterprising forward movement after a back-foot forehand intercepts the ball before the bounce inside the service line, cutting the inner meridians of the felt to fade this backhand drop volley away from Sinner.

Incredible north-south movement from Alcaraz to find a volley one ball after the quality of Sinner’s return. See their Indian Wells 2023 recap.

But for all of Alcaraz’s impressive tricks with the slices, volleys, and approach forehands, it was Sinner who was so very close to winning in straight sets. The Italian had a couple of break chances at 4-3 in the second, saved off the back of some timely first serves from Alcaraz, and it was one of the best games of the match as both raised their level simultaneously. Sinner is just far more predictable in his point-to-point business, and that can be a good thing when being predictable means crushing it from both wings and covering the court like a spider. We’ve had a decade-plus witnessing how successful Djokovic was largely by being better at the basics, and I feel Sinner’s game is something of that sort, but steeped in the more frenetic pace of play that younger players are bringing today. While Alcaraz has won all three of their encounters in 2024, the conditions have been in his favour (Indian Wells, Roland Garros, and Beijing are all on the slower side of things) and Sinner’s serve — the biggest edge he has over Alcaraz — has underperformed in each of these matches. Whether that is due to Alcaraz I am not sure, but I do hope they meet a few more times again this season — heck, I’d take next week in Shanghai — as their matches are not only part of an important rivalry, the tennis itself touches unchartered levels of speed and aggression that make for riveting viewing, and that’s always going to be good for tennis. Sports are simply entertainment, after all.

Going nowhere in an interesting way is fine with me, for now.

Hope to be back after Shanghai with a recap. I’ll see you in the comments. HC

1. I think Alcaraz hits more body serves than Sinner in a bid to generate short balls and protect against Sinner’s deadly return strikes. Sinner’s backhand is also a longer swing than Alcaraz’s, maybe making it more difficult to play as a compact approach shot.

2. Dan Evans is the only guy who is comparable in terms of defensive movement and backhand slice mastery.