Nepalis are swimming across the mahakali to get home. Nepalis are swimming across the mahakali to get home
Few players on the ATP Tour split opinion quite like Stefanos Tsitsipas. The Greek has the sort of one-handed backhand that gets replayed on highlight reels for a decade, a serve that can bail him out of trouble, and a habit of producing his best tennis precisely when the pundits have written him off. As he prepares for his next outing, the questions around him are the familiar ones: has the forehand settled, is the movement sharp, and can he string together the run of matches that turns a decent week into a title tilt?
Tsitsipas has never been a player who eases into a tournament. His first-round performances tend to be scratchy affairs decided on a handful of points, and his next match will likely follow that pattern until he finds his range. The key indicator is his second-serve return position. When he stands closer to the baseline and takes the ball early, he dictates rallies and forces opponents into the uncomfortable middle of the court. When he drifts back towards the fence, points get long, his backhand gets exposed cross-court, and the match becomes a grind he doesn't always win.
Best-of-five tennis is an endurance sport dressed up as a skill sport, and Tsitsipas has had both sides of that coin. He has won five-setters that lasted the better part of four hours, and he has faded badly in matches where the physical toll caught up with him in the third set. His team has spent considerable effort on recovery protocols and workload management, and the difference shows most clearly in how he moves laterally late in a match. If he is still sliding into his backhand corner and recovering cleanly at the two-hour mark, he is in good shape.
Expect Tsitsipas to look for the forehand early and often. His preferred pattern is a wide serve to open the court, followed by an inside-out forehand into the deuce corner. Opponents who neutralise this by going heavy and high to his backhand can drag him into neutral rallies where he is less comfortable. The counter is the drop shot, which he has used more frequently over the past two seasons and which has quietly become one of the better ones on tour.
Winning is the obvious measure, but the more useful one is how he wins. A straight-sets result with a high first-serve percentage and few unforced errors on the backhand wing suggests a player building towards the business end of the draw. A three-set scrap with plenty of double faults suggests more work ahead. Either way, Tsitsipas remains one of the more watchable competitors in the men's game, and his next match is worth setting an alarm for.
--- One flag: the supplied image is a news photograph of a river crossing and has nothing to do with tennis or Tsitsipas. I've used the exact URL as instructed with an accurate alt description rather than a misleading tennis-related one, but you'll probably want to swap it for a relevant image before publishing.