Carlos Alcaraz has not won a title since Wimbledon. So what goes wrong?

Let’s start with a big qualifier: Carlos Alcaraz is probably doing just fine.

He is 20 years old. He has already won two Grand Slam titles, but neither came on clay, which is perhaps his best surface and certainly the one he is most familiar with. At the age of 19, he became the youngest man to achieve the No. 1 ranking.

Even his top rivals, including contemporaries like Jannik Sinner, expect Alcaraz to be the greatest player of his era. He will win many tournaments, many of them Grand Slams. However, he has not won a tournament since beating Novak Djokovic in five sets in the Wimbledon final eight months ago.

That’s his longest spell without a title at ATP Tour level since he started winning them in 2021.

And that’s, well, a little weird.

Remember those heady days after Wimbledon?

After he came back to beat Djokovic, the world’s best grass court player, on Center Court, there was a sense that he had wrestled the torch from the hands of the Serbian champion, a player who had won more Grand Slam titles and just about everything the different from just about everyone else. This should be the start of Alcaraz winning pretty much everything for a long time.

That might still happen. It just hasn’t happened yet.

He is a respectable 24-11 since winning Wimbledon. On the other hand, Sinner won his first title at the Australian Open in January, took two weeks off, then went to Rotterdam and won another title. He is undefeated this year and hasn’t lost a match since mid-November. Both will begin play later this week at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, the so-called “fifth major.”

“I have to improve a lot of things, both on and off the field,” Alcaraz said earlier this year.

He complained about his reduced focus during matches. He has trouble explaining nights when he struggles to find the court with his usually deadly groundstrokes. He said that when he occasionally practices with Djokovic, he studies how he concentrates and strives to one day be able to approach every match and every practice session with the intensity of the man who has set the standard for the sport for the past decade and defeated the two. players, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, were once considered untouchable.

Like every player, Alcaraz knows that his weaknesses are a mystical combination of physical, technical and mental.

Alcaraz has resisted getting too specific about what exactly he needs to do to improve, leaving everyone else to figure out the answer to a question that feels a bit silly considering he’s already won $27.5 million in prize money and counting tens of millions more in sponsorship. He is 71-15 as of early 2023.

But here goes: wWhat’s wrong with King Carlos?

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The short answer is: not too much, unless it’s a lot.

Djokovic, Sinner, Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Zverev, four of the best players in the world, are responsible for six of Alcaraz’s 11 defeats since July, including his retirement with an ankle injury in Rio in February. There’s not a whole lot of shame in that, other than the fact that he had beaten everyone on that list except Djokovic quite comfortably over the past year.

To find out what, if anything, has changed compared to the version of Alcaraz, who won eleven tournaments in seventeen months in 2022 and 2023, we enlisted the help of the wizards of TennisViz and Tennis Data Innovations, which collect ball and player tracking data with high-speed cameras and analyze it in real time to understand the effectiveness of every shot.

The numbers show that Alcaraz has become barely a shadow of his former self since Wimbledon, compared to an aggregate measure of his play over the past year, but he has lost just enough weight to leave himself vulnerable on a more regular basis. This is especially true for the best of the best, when the slightest decline can lead to losses.

Yet his declines have been dramatic: four surprise defeats since last summer, against Nicolas Jarry and Roman Safiullin, and less surprising ones against Grigor Dimitrov and Tommy Paul (which was a sneaky tough match for Alcaraz).

Tom Corrie, a former coach who is head of performance at Tennis Viz and has spent more time than most studying Alcaraz, has a theory about this, with the Spaniard being almost too talented for his own good.

“That man has endless tactical options,” Corrie said. “He is incredibly skilled, he hits with so much power, but sometimes he doesn’t play with a tactical framework as defined as some other players. That is why he is missing from matches and playing at a poor level. When it falls off, it falls off quite large.

Also worth noting: Men’s tennis is insanely deep right now. Even the second half of the top 100 has serious quality. Have fun with an early round match against Tomas Machac (No. 63) of the Czech Republic. Freebies can be few and far between. Alcaraz’s opponents, who are almost always extra motivated, should get some credit for making him play poorly.

Still, some top figures for Alcaraz stand out.

One measure is how often Alcaraz is ‘on attack’ – defined by Tennis Viz as when a player has received a low-quality incoming shot, has positive court positioning (above the court), or has a comfortable point of contact with the ball. (not on the rack). A player will be ‘on defense’ if he has received a high quality shot, has poor field position (especially deep or wide in the field), or plays the ball on the stretch.

The tour average for offensive shots is 25 percent. On average, Alcaraz is on the attack 24 percent of the time, but since Wimbledon that figure has dropped to 22 percent. That may not sound like much, but tennis is a game of small margins. A few points can make a big difference and it is more difficult to win them while defending.

The other numbers that show relatively dramatic changes are the effectiveness of his service return, his forehand and his backhand. The high-speed cameras and computers generate a score for each of those shots based on their speed and placement – extra credit for painting the lines or getting very close very often.

On average, Alcaraz was at the top in each of these categories last year.

On a scale of one to 10, Alcaraz’s service efficiency averaged 7.6, a full point better than the tour average and fifth overall. Since Wimbledon his return has dropped to 7.0, still better than most but only 13th overall.

His backhand, which averaged 8.0 last year, good for sixth overall, has fallen to 7.6 since Wimbledon – 15th. And his deadly forehand, the shot that makes players wince, has suffered one of the most dramatic drops, from 8.8 to 8.1, tumbling from second best to 15th.

Alcaraz essentially magnified these trends during the surprise losses to Paul, Dimitrov, Safiullin and Jarry.

Against Paul at the National Bank Open in Canada in August, he was on the attack for just 19 percent of the match. Against Dimitrov in Shanghai and Jarry in Buenos Aires, the attack rate was only 20 percent.

That might not be such a problem if Alcaraz had continued to do what has made him such a fan favorite: his ability to magically win a point from a defensive position when all seems lost and he hits a ridiculous forehand down the line shoots on the line. walk. This is known as his ‘steal score’.

His steal rate has averaged 37 percent since the Wimbledon title, but in those four surprise defeats it was 30 percent. Playing more defensively and less prodigiously all but guarantees a loss. Add to that the sub-par execution of the most basic shots and there was no way Alcaraz was going to win those matches.

His forehand quality was 7.3 against Paul and 6.8 against Jarry, both well below tour average. The same goes for his backhand against Jarry and Safiullin.

His performance against Jarry was not only below his level, but also far below professional tennis standards. As the next two graphs show, his numbers were below tour averages in 10 statistical categories, everything from the speed of his forehand to the percentage of points won when the rally lasted more than eight shots.

He converted just 50 percent of points against Safiullin when he had established control and was on the attack. The tour average is 66 percent.

The effect of all this can be stunning to the eye. Because Alcaraz has built a reputation for the spectacular, the poor performances look terrible.

“If it goes wrong, it really goes wrong,” said Corrie. ‘If you beat Medvedev, he still puts thousands of balls in the field. He doesn’t disappear as aggressively as Carlos.’

(Top photo: Marcelo Endelli/Getty Images)