Novak Djokovic gone, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner out – is the Paris Masters losing its gloss?
The final rounds of the Paris Masters are lacking some of the biggest names in men’s tennis and yet this is no surprise.
With Novak Djokovic opting against playing in Paris as he favoured a week on a beach in the Maldives with his family, the concluding Masters event of the ATP Tour season has often thrown up some surprise results, with Carlos Alcaraz’s defeat against Ugo Humbert the biggest of the lot.
No 4 seed Daniil Medvedev suffered an early exit at the hands of Australia’s Alexei Popyrin, while the newly bleach-blonde-haired Taylor Fritz was beaten in his first match against Jack Draper.
Alcaraz, Medvedev and Fritz will not lose too much sleep over their lack of match time on the super-fast courts in Bercy, as they are already assured of their places in the ATP Finals.
Yet while enduringly annoying Paris crowds have enjoyed some big wins for French players despite shouting out at ill-time moments and relentlessly trying to draw attention to themselves with their chants, French tennis chiefs should consider Alcaraz’s comments when the tournament moves to a new venue next year.
Why do we need the final Masters event of the year to be played on a court that most players are saying is faster than anything they have played on this year or in any year?
It makes no sense to take players out of their comfort zone, especially when many of those competing in Paris will play on very different surfaces at the ATP Finals and the Davis Cup Finals in Malaga in their final events of the year.
It is hard enough for tennis players to adapt to hard courts, clay courts, grass courts, indoor courts and different brands of tennis balls at virtually every tournament without throwing the wild card of a super-fast indoor court at the end of the year.
Alcaraz has complained about the fast conditions in Paris after his first match against Nicolas Jarry before he was beaten 6-1, 3-6, 7-5 in front of an exuberant Paris crowd who cheered on the Frenchman to the stand-out win of his career so far.
While Alcaraz is generally respectful both in victory and defeat, he failed to contain his annoyance after the match as he suggested the conditions in Paris made it impossible to play his best tennis.
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“This court… I mean, I don’t want to say something that there is going to sound like an excuse,” said Alcaraz.
“First of all, Ugo deserves to win, that’s obvious, but it depends. Because I play, for example, the Davis Cup indoor court and the court was way slower than this one.
“When I played the first match, the stats came out that it is the fastest court in the Masters 1000, probably on the tour right now. This is crazy. I don’t know. Probably and the fastest one, you know, in the last ten years in this tournament.
“So I don’t know why they do it. I don’t know why they have changed a court from other tournaments and obviously in the same tournament, compared to other years.
“It surprised me a little bit, so I came here with not too many days. Probably I had to come earlier to get used to these conditions but I didn’t. But, honestly, all I can say is I don’t understand why they did it.”
With Novak Djokovic opting not to play in Paris and spend his week on a beach in the Maldives instead, he may well be looking in on the chaos the top players have lived through relieved he did not put his reputation on the line to deal with disrespectful French crowds he previously described as ‘not always possible to tolerate’.
The bigger picture for Paris tennis chiefs should be that Djokovic may not be alone in withdrawing from the last Masters tournament of the year if it is played on a court no one seems to be enjoying and with fans who simply cannot control their own egos to try and get involved in the match.
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