Alexander Zverev left Wimbledon with the best fortnight of his career behind him and a ranking he has not held in years. He also left it being told, again, that he is too passive to beat Jannik Sinner.
The German lost Sunday’s final 6-7(7), 7-6(2), 6-3, 6-4, a defeat that nonetheless carried him past the injured Carlos Alcaraz and into second place in the ATP rankings on Monday. It was his 10th consecutive loss to Sinner, who now leads their head-to-head 11-4 and has taken 17 of the past 18 sets between them.
For much of three sets, the German looked like a man who had solved something. His serve was close to untouchable. His forehand, for years the shot opponents targeted, was being hit through the court rather than steered. He took the opening set in a tie-break, ending a run of 14 straight sets lost to the Italian.
Then, at 3-3 in the third, on the only break point he would earn all afternoon, he slipped chasing a Sinner drop shot and hyperextended his right knee — an injury he later said mirrored one he suffered two years ago. Sinner walked around the net to help him up. Zverev played on without a medical timeout, but conceded afterwards that his serve speed dropped because he could not push off properly. He was broken two games later.
That single point has become the argument.
‘Hoping for help’
Speaking on Tennis Channel, Courier acknowledged the slip cost Zverev the chance, but said the point was already being lost before the fall. The American pointed to the sliced, defensive shots Zverev had played earlier in the rally, saying the German was “hoping for help instead of taking it” — and that against a player of Sinner’s standard, that is not a strategy that survives contact.
Courier went further, reading Zverev’s own post-match remarks as evidence of a man who has, in effect, banked his career. The German is still riding the relief of Roland Garros, the former world No. 1 suggested — a major champion at last, with an Olympic gold already on the shelf, and no longer hungry in the way the moment demanded.
Navratilova, alongside him, made the same point tactically. Zverev, she said, “shouldn’t have been that far back behind the baseline” at the decisive moment. She contrasted the two slips in the match: Sinner also lost his footing in the third set, got up, and won the point — a matter, she argued, of balance, and of a childhood spent on skis.
The criticism was not confined to the broadcast booth. On her own podcast, Rennae Stubbs — who coaches Serena Williams — questioned the scale of Zverev’s celebration after taking the first set, calling it over the top, and identified the first point of the second-set tie-break, when he shanked a forehand badly wide, as the moment she knew the final was gone.
The defense
Zverev’s own account is more forgiving of himself, and not without evidence. He has now reached back-to-back major finals, won the first of them, and produced his best Wimbledon by some distance after never previously passing the fourth round. He has reached the semi-finals at four of the five Masters 1000 events staged this year.
Asked whether he can genuinely trouble the top two, he replied that he had pushed Sinner and Alcaraz to their limits this season without beating either — Alcaraz over five sets in Melbourne, Sinner over four here. He was unambiguous about the man across the net, calling Sinner “still the best player in the world”. And he defended the approach that his critics say deserted him: “That’s the tennis I want to play,” he said, arguing that the more he commits to it, the better it will hold.
He is 29. He has one major. The two men above him have twelve between them. Next comes a knee to be assessed and a hard-court swing — Montreal from 2 August, then Cincinnati, then New York — on which the No. 2 ranking he takes into it will be judged. The verdict on whether Wimbledon was a breakthrough or another near-miss will not be settled in a commentary box. It will be settled in August
