Key events
De Minaur won the toss and decided to receive; ready… play.
Sinner and Alcaraz, by the way, are fighting to finish the year as world number one. Alcaraz needs 450 points to guarantee this honor; he can achieve this by winning three round-robin matches or reaching the final.
If he loses all three matches, Sinner must win two to win the title; if he wins one and loses two, Sinner must win two and win the title; and if he wins two matches and doesn't make it to the final, Sinner will have to win every match on his way to the title.
So what can De Minaur do to win? Uh, not much, but he might want to extend the rally by denying Alcaraz a corner, hitting up the middle and hoping to frustrate him by making him hit too many improbable winners. Or he can take as many shots as possible, Wawrinka-style, looking for winners and hoping to hit the target. However, unlike Stanimal, he does not have a game for the latter, leaving him with the former.
…and then comes the genius.
And here comes the Demon…
Our players are ready to take the court; “All phones are switched off,” our host says, people saving the moment they didn’t live. I wonder if at least one of them will ever watch their video again.
Also happens:
Some pre-match reading;
I'd like to think that Fritz has what it takes to beat the big two on a good day, but I'm afraid I won't be able to convince myself. Every tournament they both competed in this year, one of them won.
A word to the wise: has nothing to do with tennis, but Wu Yijie leads John Higgins 8-4 in the final of the International Snooker Championship. He has yet to win a ranking title, but it looks like he will almost certainly get one, and at 22 years old he is bound to become a superstar.
After filling out the field, in Bjorn Borg's band Alexander Zverev and Ben Shelton, who meet tonight, along with Jannik Sinner and Felix Auger-Aliassime, whose competition we'll be covering tomorrow night.
Also in the Jimmy Connors Band: Lorenzo Musetti and Taylor Fritz meet tomorrow afternoon. The former is only serving as a substitute because Novak Djokovic beat him in the final of the Greek Marathon Championships last night and then withdrew from the competition this week due to injury.
Men's tennis is in an interesting position, isn't it? Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner changed their majors this year and are undoubtedly moving away from pursuit. In some ways this is a good thing – rivalries are crucial in individual sports, where most are not fanatically attached to any one player – but at the same time, while Grand Slam tournaments remain fantastic because they are about so much more than the top two players, they also seem predictable since we almost certainly know which players will battle it out in the final. The hope is that in the next year or two Jack Draper, Joao Fonseca and perhaps Jakub Mensik and Jiri Lehecka will improve enough to challenge, but in the meantime we can expect more.
Preamble
Hello and welcome to ATP Finals 2025 – day one!
Our week of fun begins with perhaps the most fun. Very few people enjoy the stress of competition as much as Carlos Alcarazhis unique strength and creativity, unlike anything we have seen before, the pleasure he takes from his virtuosity as affirming as the virtuosity itself.
On the other side, Alex de Minaur makes tennis look as difficult as it is, racing and hustling to mitigate its relative lack of strength while having little apparent enjoyment in the process. He is yet to beat the world number two in four matches and, to be fair, that's unlikely to change this afternoon.
But if Alcaraz has an off day – and just two weeks ago he lost to Cameron Norrie in Paris – De Minaur, who is consistent and mentally strong enough to punish him, has a chance.
Play: 12:00 local time, 13:00 GMT.
