Tennis mailbag: Challenging Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, baseline boredom, doping debate

Tennis stops for nothing. The ATP Next Gen Finals event rolls on in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, while various pre-Christmas exhibitions occupy players before the season resumes from December 27 with the United Cup in Perth, Australia.

There’s still time for some reflection on 2024, and The Athletic’s tennis writers Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare are here for the first of two mailbags, answering your questions submitted earlier this month. This will focus on the season just gone; the next will focus more on 2025.

Read on for their views on how to challenge Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz in the men’s game; the timeline for equal pay between the WTA and ATP Tours; whether or not tennis is getting boring and if the sport is embroiled in a doping crisis.

Anon: Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic put the grand slams in a headlock for 15 years. What will the current players do (and or can do) to prevent Sinner and Alcaraz from the doing the same? What lessons were learned?

Charlie Eccleshare: The ‘Big Three’ were freakish in their consistency. Even all-time greats ordinarily have off days, some of which result in them exiting a major or two per year prematurely. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic mostly avoided even that, but Alcaraz in particular looks prone to the odd upset (witness the U.S. Open this year, even if that was after a particularly gruelling run comprising two Grand Slam titles and an Olympic final).

Sinner currently has a higher floor and is far less prone to playing a few listless sets in a row; uncertainty of a different kind surrounds him because of the potential for a doping ban of up to two years. But should they both remain available and reasonably consistent, then the rest of the field has a major problem.

Casper Ruud summed it up at the ATP Tour Finals last month when he explained that the way Sinner and Alcaraz play has rewritten the book of tennis tactics that he grew up with. Patience is no longer an option with these two around: to beat them the chasing pack are going to have to teach themselves to be more aggressive even if it doesn’t come naturally. Alexander Zverev and Taylor Fritz look most up for the challenge of the current top 10.

Where Alcaraz and Sinner do recall the Big Three’s hegemony is how their extraterrestrial talent demands players to play outside themselves to beat them. It’s not enough to just hit big serves and forehands and hope that will do the job. Players need to claim the front of the court before Alcaraz and capture the baseline before Sinner — and throw in a bit of the opposite to keep them off balance. For an entire match at a time.

Matt Futterman: Right now, I don’t see Sinner and Alcaraz sharing all the Grand Slams for a decade. It’s a lot harder for two players to do that than three or four, and they are the only ones at their level — other than the version of Djokovic that won Olympic gold in Paris.

They’re going to have to deal with injuries. Sinner could get suspended for two years. Stuff happens. Others will hope to fill any voids.

Dana L: What will it take to have equal pay for the women on the tour? Why is there still such a wide discrepancy below the grand slam level?

MF: Short answer is the TV contracts. The women’s tour contracts bring in about one-seventh of what the men’s tour contracts do. Sponsorships are also a lot cheaper. In a lot of cases I chalk that up to poor management and marketing. The WTA takes low-hanging fruit and sells tournaments to locations where the attendance is terrible and the seats are empty. What media or marketing executive is going to turn on a match and say, “that’s where I want to be?”

CE: The short answer: a genuine commitment from tennis’ various stakeholders to deliver genuine equality. It’s amazing how quickly things can happen when there’s a will. The WTA has committed to achieving equal prize money at combined events by 2027 and non-combined by 2033, but this remains a really hot topic. When I spoke to Aryna Sabalenka at the WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia she cited the need for equal prize money as one of the sport’s biggest issues.

Max Y: Why is there so little variety on the ATP and WTA tours at the moment in terms of game style? The ATP Finals in Turin encapsulated perfectly just how similar and frankly boring the way the top players play nowadays: it’s all just big baseline games, consistent two-handed backhands and very little variety, making for a pretty dull competition.

MF: Take heart — it’s better than it was, at least on the ATP Tour. Alcaraz has forced everyone to start thinking about the entire tennis court, not just the area along the baseline. Also, with Alcaraz and Sinner playing so aggressively, players increasingly have to attack before they are attacked. That is going to force them to come into the court more and build variety.

As for the women, a lot of us wish Karolina Muchova could clone herself 50 times. That said, Sabalenka has increasingly been using a drop shot. Coco Gauff is working hard on getting better at the net. A wave of serve-and-volley players seems unlikely, but we will take what we can get.

Throw out Turin. It’s a one-off. Indoors, on a very fast court with no sun or wind to contend with, players can sit back and go bang. That won’t happen nearly as much in Australia and certainly not on the organic surfaces from April to mid-July. Single-handed backhands seem like a terrible idea until you watch Lorenzo Musetti thrive at Wimbledon with that killer slice and the ability to roll it at the last second. Plus, Alcaraz is a shotmaker. To borrow the basketball phrase, shooters have to shoot. As long as he is around he will be trying all kinds of mad stuff, and others will try to follow.

Karolina Muchova’s gamestyle captivated tennis fans when she played in 2024. (Pamela Smith / Associated Press)

Anon: When are we going to stop describing men’s tennis as boring baseline battles — variety (net approaches, drop shots, serve/volley, unexpected shot selections) seem to be the norm now, not the exception. Feel like no one’s acknowledging/celebrating one of the most exciting periods of men’s tennis play; all top players need to use the whole court now.

James Hansen: A dissenting voice is always welcome. The younger players in the top-15-40ish bracket do seem a little more willing to experiment, perhaps being less entrenched than the players mentioned above who grew up through Nadal and Djokovic’s total mastery of baseline tennis. Where we might disagree is the idea that top players need to use the whole court. They do — but most of them can’t and don’t, especially when under pressure. Sinner and Alcaraz’s ability to play the way they do in the tightest moments, particularly that stratospheric tiebreak in the China Open final in Beijing, is what sets them even further apart.

Christopher Z: Is there anyone who peaked this year that we expect to take a step back? Are Jasmine Paolini and Taylor Fritz really top-5 players?

CE: That’s an interesting one. I kept thinking that Paolini would surely come back down to earth at some point last year, and yet she just kept on producing. Maybe she won’t have quite the same impact as she did this year, but I’d expect her to remain in the top 10 and challenge for a few titles.

As for Fritz, his progress feels very sustainable to me. He’s not someone who’s suddenly burst onto the scene, but instead has kept making incremental improvements. You can say 2024 was a breakthrough year for him, but he’s been knocking at the door for a while and it was striking to hear him say that he didn’t even think he’d played that well in reaching the U.S. Open final. It was more than an opportunity presented itself, and he was solid enough to take it.

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Someone I’d expect to take a step back is Alejandro Tabilo, who began the year ranked world No. 85, achieved a career high of No. 19 and is currently at No. 23. During the first half of the year, the 27-year-old Chilean had one of those periods where everything seemed to slot into place, taking in winning the Auckland 250 in January as a qualifier and then knocking an ailing Djokovic out of Rome on the way to the Italian Open semis. I’d be surprised if he hits similar heights in 2025.

Jasmine Paolini had the best season of her career in 2024. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

Parva S: Why is there a rise in doping in tennis or is it just a recency bias?

MF: As my colleague Charlie Eccleshare reported in November, testing numbers and the number of anti-doping rule violations have remained pretty steady over the last few years according to the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA). The agency sanctioned 12 individuals for doping offenses in 2022, compared with 13 last year, but two world No. 1s getting sanctioned in the same year is extraordinary. As testing becomes increasingly sophisticated and detects smaller and smaller amounts of foreign substances in blood and urine, it stands to reason that positive tests will rise.

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Katherine W: What’s your take on the Ultimate Tennis Showdown? Here to stay or fade away?

CE: I do think it has a place, and the players seem to enjoy it and feel like it’s useful fitness work because of how explosive it is. The chance to win thousands of dollars probably helps too. Fans also appear to like it and there’s something to be said for events that guarantee — or close to guarantee — seeing the players who are competing at the event, unlike in most ATP and WTA tournaments where there’s always a risk your favourite player could go out early or not be playing on a given day.

Some of the rules, like only having one serve, should also give tennis pause for thought about whether there are elements of UTS that would work well on the main tour. Co-creator Patrick Mouratoglou certainly sounds very determined to make a success of it, so I’d be surprised if it went anywhere anytime soon.

Patrick L: Is Andy Murray coaching Djokovic a one-off or are they looking for it to be a long-term arrangement?

CE: At the moment, the Murray-Djokovic partnership is a short-term arrangement, but if things go well in Melbourne it’s tough to imagine either party walking away. Certainly not Djokovic, but also Murray: can you really see someone as competitive as him turning his back on a winning ticket?

He would like a bit of time at home at some stage, but that was true when he accepted the chance to work with the 24-time Grand Slam champion and his longtime rival of the 2010s. I suspect that Murray will love the buzz of coaching and being back in a Grand Slam environment, especially if they reach the latter stages where Murray hasn’t been for coming up to eight years. Should things go badly, that’s another story.

(Top photo: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)