Carlos Alcaraz is sometimes outplayed. He has, after all, won just one tournament since Wimbledon last year.
But he is very rarely out-dazzled.
Even in defeat, the acrobatic, elastic, explosive Alcaraz usually wins the highlights.
Not in Miami on Thursday night. Grigor Dimitrov does not have Alcaraz’s major-winning résumé, even after more than a decade on tour. But he remains a beautiful tennis player: a silken mover who puts an extra coat of polish on his shots, including his increasingly unusual one-handed drive backhand.
He was at the summit of his art in this Miami Open quarterfinal, sweeping past the top seeded Alcaraz 6-2, 6-4 in a virtuoso all-court display of controlled risk and emotion.
He ripped return winners. He chased and defended brilliantly, mixed spins astutely and volleyed spectacularly: lunging low to produce one unanswerable forehand drop volley that had the sportsmanlike Alcaraz applauding as he jogged fruitlessly forward.
Showtime knows showtime.
“I think overall to win against him you have to play at your best,” Dimitrov said. “That’s just how it is. I came into the match very focused and I think extremely clear about what I had to do. Sometimes simplicity is genius.”
But only sometimes. Simplicity does not guarantee accuracy. Simplicity does not guarantee velocity, and simplicity certainly does not guarantee that you can take several steps inside the court on second-serve returns against one of the very best players on the planet and repeatedly smack clean inside-out backhand winners off the short hop.
Though many players surely realize the folly of giving Alcaraz time to create, finding a way to rush and fluster the 20-year-old Spaniard and still keep the ball on the right side of the lines is a great deal to ask.
“It’s very, very hard to do it,” said Dimitrov, who summed up the danger nicely by calling Alcaraz “a firecracker”. “But I was really able to dictate the game, read the game a little bit better than last time.”
The last time, Dimitrov won, as well, defeating Alcaraz in the round of 16 in Shanghai in October. But that victory, his first against the Spaniard, was a three-set thriller that required Dimitrov to come from behind.
Thursday night, he was the frontrunner from the opening game and, to his considerable credit, he closed out the victory despite a second-set surge from Alcaraz that erased Dimitrov’s 4-1 lead in a blaze of full-cut brilliance.
That fightback included breaking Dimitrov at love in the seventh game. The average Alcaraz forehand speed in those four points was 95 miles per hour (153 kph).
“Absolutely nothing I could have done,” Dimitrov said. “Can I get mad? Yeah, I can, but there was no reason for me to kind of drift away. I just had to stay patient. I was aware of what was happening, how it was happening.”
If Alcaraz had managed to put a higher number of big first serves in play down the stretch, awareness might not have mattered. But opportunity did knock in the 10th game, and Dimitrov threw open the door again. The key point came with Alcaraz serving at 15-30. He slashed a forehand and sprinted forward, attacking Dimitrov’s backhand corner, but instead of Dimitrov coming over the ball with full force, which likely would have left Alcaraz with a volley he could punch, Dimitrov chose finesse under duress on the slide. He went with a crisp-but-not-too-crisp backhand slice crosscourt that left Alcaraz with a low, change-of-pace shot to manage.
The Spaniard’s lunging backhand drop volley was not good enough, and Dimitrov’s running forehand passing shot winner gave him a match point. He converted and let loose a howl worthy of Danielle Collins, the combative American master of the “Come onnnnn!” who is back on one of her hot streaks and into the Miami Open women’s final to face Elena Rybakina.
“I didn’t pull back,” Dimitrov said of that last break of serve. “I kept on believing in the game that I was playing.”
Alcaraz did not play badly. Dimitrov played superbly. He had 24 winners to just 14 unforced errors. He was 12-for-16 at net and put 87 percent of his first-serve returns in play and converted four of eight break points.
It was all enough to make Alcaraz feel the weight of the years rather than the other way around.
“I have a lot of frustrations right now, because he made me feel like I'm 13,” Alcaraz said, shaking his head and grinning. “You know, it was crazy. I was talking to my team saying that I don't know what I have to do. I don't know his weakness. I don't know anything.”
Informed of Alcaraz’s analysis and that the age gap on Thursday was bigger than he might have realized, the 32-year-old Dimitrov cracked up.
“He's, for me, one of the craftiest players out there,” Dimitrov said. “I can put myself in his shoes in certain moments, and I can kind of guess, so to speak, what might come. But what might come, it's not like it will. He's so explosive throughout the court, so you really need to put him in uncomfortable position. I think sometimes you need to deliver that power yourself.”
There are no guarantees from here, even after breaking his seven-match losing streak against Alexander Zverev in the semifinals with another brilliant performance full of timely serves on the line and acrobatic volleys, including a forehand winner on the way to the ground to break Zverev in the third set. But Dimitrov must now face Jannik Sinner, the best player of 2024, who has beaten him in their two most recent matches.
Win or more likely lose, the Dimitrov renaissance is for real. At this late stage, he continues to prove his relevance and on Monday, he will be the second oldest player in the top 10 behind a certain bristle-haired 36-year-old from Serbia now in the market for a new coach.
“I think for Grigor the key over the last 12 months has really been being consistent with his performances and building his base level and not having many ups and downs,” Daniel Vallverdu, one of his coaches, told me. “That builds the right groundwork, so then when you go into these bigger matches you trust your base level more and don’t feel you have to overplay.”
Vallverdu shares the coaching duties and splits the travel burden with Jamie Delgado, who is in in Miami.
“If you look at the stats, the matches Grigor has won against top 10 players, he’s been a little more aggressive than usual,” Vallverdu said. “He’s been utilizing his weapons, which are his serve and forehand and variety on the backhand side. He’s been finding that balance really well.”
That is no coincidence. Vallverdu said Dimitrov has been particularly diligent in practice and is “probably the fittest he’s been in his career”.
“He’s also in a good place mentally,” Vallverdu said. “He’s at peace with himself and has a great team around him. He is looking forward to pushing himself for the next few years of his career, because he knows he’s coming to the later stages and wants to put it all on the table and give everything he has, which he’s done the last 12 months.”
Dimitrov, who reached the final of the Paris Masters in November, is back in the top 10 after more than five years: a tribute to his talent and staying power.
He also has now reassured his stylistic older cousin Roger Federer (and quite a few other nostalgics) by restoring the single-handed backhand to the Top 10. Since late February, for the first time ever, no player with a one-hander has been part of that elite group.
“That’s a dagger right there,” Federer told GQ this month. “That one was personal.”
Federer’s two sets of twins, it should be noted, all have two-handed backhands. But Federer’s wife Mirka, a former WTA player, did have a two-hander, so perhaps the house rules were unclear.
And yet the one-hander has certainly been working wonders for Dimitrov in Miami and beyond. Though it long ago began to seem both unkind and unfair to compare Dimitrov to the great Federer just because of their similar game styles, he is perhaps the closest Alcaraz will get to playing the Swiss superstar, who retired before they could inter-generationally face off.
Baby Fed is now undeniably Grownup Grigor. (“He owns being himself,” Vallverdu said.) But the elegant Bulgarian does pose some of the same tactical challenges even if the forehand is not quite so dazzling, the serve not so consistently and devastatingly precise and the backhand slice and hair flip not quite so surgical.
Like Federer, Dimitrov has the full tool set and unlike Federer he can do the splits and is still chasing his first Grand Slam title. For now, Dimitrov’s greatest triumph was winning the ATP Finals in 2017. But his greatest match might have come earlier that year when he lost to Rafael Nadal in a stupendous, five-set semifinal at the Australian Open. He also was the last man to play (and defeat) Federer at the US Open, beating him in five sets in the quarterfinals in 2019.
His run in Miami means that he has reached the final four in eight of the nine Masters 1000 events, missing only Madrid, but he has perhaps never played a better best-of-three-set match than he played on Thursday against Alcaraz.
“I think this was one of those performances that tennis gives you when you’ve been doing the right things for a while,” Vallverdu said.
Dimitrov not only won the quarterfinal. He won the highlights, making it all look so much simpler than it was.
CC
P.S.: It’s been exactly 20 years since Federer & Nadal played for the first time in singles (they already had played in doubles). Their match came at the Miami Open on March 28, 2004, and the result came as quite a surprise: launching one of the greatest rivalries in sports. An excerpt from my NYT bestselling book THE MASTER is below. You can pick up the latest edition here if you are in North America. It is scheduled to be re-released in the U.K. and other international markets in early May.
Chris, you captured this exhilarating match perfectly (of course!). Rooting Grigor on while fully expecting Carlitos to take control at any minute. So thrilled for Grigor! And Carlitos will be just fine.
Thank you for a great piece, but especially this line, which will stay with me:
“the backhand slice and hair flip not quite so surgical.”
CC excellence in action.