I've seen the future of tennis. It's Sinner v Alcaraz

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

Back in 1961, the famous New York Times writer Robert Sheldon saw a warm-up act at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Valley, and wrote a review about an unknown singer called – checks notes – 'Bob Dylan'.
Citing his 'searing intensity,' and his stunning 'originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth,' Sheldon famously observed it 'it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up'. It is often cited as the most prescient reviews of all time, the one that picked early that Dylan would dominate the music scene for a generation.
Watching this Wimbledon men's singles final, however, one needed no such prescience, no such expert insight, to offer up the bleeding obvious.
Italy's Jannik Sinner and Spain's Carlos Alcaraz – meeting in the final of a major for just the second time, after their epic, record-breaking battle at Roland Garros just last month, and won by Alcaraz – will, individually and often as a duo, dominate tennis majors for years to come. And those who thought we'd never see ever again the likes of the rivalry between the retired Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, let alone the fading Novak Djokovic, must think again.
What a match! What an atmosphere! What a sheer, epic contest between two young titans in a suddenly elevated titanic tennis age. So brilliant were they, the fascination was not just who would win, but just how wonderfully their skills countered each other, to make so many points epic contests in themselves.
For it was not just the extraordinary array of classic tennis skills they brought to this marvellous green stage. It is the other talents that sheer take the breath away. With both players regularly hitting forehands and blistering backhands of over 160km/h, and serves so fast they could be booked for speeding on open freeways, they both had the punch that would have done Muhammad Ali proud. Could Usain Bolt move as fast around the court as these two with tennis racquet in hand, the way they do? I doubt it. Time and again, Alcaraz unleashed a curious kind of chip shot lob, with backspin and just over Sinner's reach, that Tiger Woods would be proud to call his own.
Sinner, particularly, showed a capacity to – from behind the baseline – hit drop shots that landed just over the net, and landed with little more bounce than a dry meat pie on a cafeteria floor. If Alcaraz didn't possess the speed of the aforesaid Bolt, and the escape skills of Harry Houdini, he never would have got close to them, let alone hit many of them back for winners. You get the drift. For every punch, a counter-punch. For every thrust, a parry. For every parry, came something we had rarely seen before.
And then there is the different way they interacted with the people that matter to them.