CNN
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For 5 hours and 29 minutes on Sunday, tennis fans around the world were treated to one of the ridiculous glasses the sport has ever seen.
Carlos Alcaraz and Giannique Sinner once again showed the future of tennis in safe hands in the longest French Open Final in history and the second-longest Grand Slam final.
With Novak Djokovic at the twilight of his career and Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal already hanging rackets, it’s completely natural for fans to worry about the considerable gap that the three greatest players of all time leave them.
But as Alcaraz and the sinner were crushed at one another in Roland Garros’ iconic red clay, exhibiting pinpoint accuracy with clever drop shots and volleys, chasing each shot with fierce determination, no one was thinking whether the Big 3 and its massive shoes were still thinking of stuffing.
Instead, it was one of the special sports moments that everyone knew they were witnessing history.
Alcaraz ended up with Victor. He returned for the first time from two sets and saved three championship points, eventually winning 4-6, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (3), and 7-6 (2). The sinner would have not deserved much attention to the match as he won the final set championship tiebreak.
Even before Sunday’s epic final, John McEnroe was so impressed by what he saw from the Paris pair that he made the point, but admitted that either Alcaraz or the sinner would beat the Big Three at peak times as “semi-craz.”
“You’ve seen them bring in Game A now. I say that I’m talking sinners and Alkaraz against Rafael Nadal in clay. He’s won this 14 times.
“You think they’re going to get to 20, 24 titles now? No. I think Plateau is very difficult. I think it’s almost impossible. There’s a deeper depth to the game, there’s bigger batters happening, and more.
“But the two guys right now are like people who look at the NBA and say they’re not better than Michael Jordan. The tennis levels right now are higher than I’ve ever seen.”
Another former world number one, Boris Becker, said the current level of tennis that Alkaraz and the sinners show is the “precise level” played by Big 3.
There is no doubt that intense rivalry can boost and even transcend the sport. Tennis has been celebrated over the past 20 years without a lack of great competition.
The drama and pageantry between Nadal and Federer in the 2008 Wimbledon Finals, and the 2012 Australian Open Finals between Nadal and Djokovic, elevated them beyond mere tennis final status. It’s a peculiar event now asking the question, “When were you where were you?”
We now have seen the blossoming of tennis’s next great rivalry. Between Alkaraz and the sinners, we now stand at an interesting crossroads.
Alcaraz leads 8-4, but decisively, he has now won five consecutive games against Sinner and appears to have the number now World No. 1. The Italians have been 111-10 since Beijing opened in 2023, but half of the losses are for Murcia men.
However, much of the appeal of watching two rivals compete during their careers comes from twisted bends as both parties try to find weaknesses and gain an advantage.
For example, between March 2013 and January 2014, Nadal defeated Federer five times in a row before the Swiss tide to win the next six matches of the two Giants from November 2015 to March 2019.
The future of tennis’s latest rivalry will be the subject of many debates during the start of Wimbledon at the end of this month, but it seems a rather safe bet for Alcaraz and the sinner, who have now won the final six Grand Slams, to compete on top for a long time from now.
Alcaraz finds it difficult to explain that he is playing in that standard match, and explains it as “surprising.”
“It’s really hard to put that into words,” he told Eurosports’ Leslie Boatrell and Alex Koretzha. “The level of Janik playing was incredible as it was two sets against No. 1 in the world.
“This is the first time I’ve come back from a set of two. Honestly, I put my heart into it. I didn’t think about the outcome, I played the best tennis at the third and fourth, and tried to play it at the fifth.
“I didn’t give up on the fifth set. It was just fighting after the points. I played with my heart at the end of the fifth. Honestly, I don’t know what I did to win this match.