At 3:33 in the morning, Carlos Alcaraz walked off the court after losing to Ben Shelton. Four hours and 28 minutes of tennis, a five-set match, a 146 mph ace to finish him off and probably a very strong desire to never see a tennis ball again that night.
He had also been sick during the match, which made the whole thing even more bizarre. And yet, somehow, the biggest question coming out of the US Open wasn’t really about Shelton. It was about Carlos Alcaraz. Is he okay? Is something wrong? Has the wrist injury affected him? Has he lost something? Is this a sign of something bigger? I kept reading all this and thinking, what exactly are we expecting from this guy now? He has just come back from more than four months away from competitive singles, won four matches at the US Open and then lost a five-set quarter-final to a player who played brilliantly. At what point did that become a crisis?
I understand the disappointment. Carlos Alcaraz is the defending champion. He wanted to win. Losing after getting yourself into a deciding tiebreak at the US Open is going to hurt like hell, especially when you have already won the tournament before. Shelton deserves the credit here too. He didn’t wait around for Alcaraz to hand him the match.
He kept coming, survived the pressure and eventually found that ridiculous serve at the end. That’s a proper win. But there is something funny about what happens whenever Carlos Alcaraz loses now. His defeat immediately becomes a question about Carlos Alcaraz himself, as if someone beating him isn’t enough anymore. We need a reason. Was it his serve? His fitness? The wrist? His mentality? His schedule? Suddenly everything gets pulled apart looking for the problem. And I think a lot of this comes from one very strange thing about his career: Carlos Alcaraz has been so good, so early, that we’ve somehow forgotten he is still only 23.
He is 23. That sentence should probably be repeated every time somebody starts talking about his career as if we are already looking back at it. Seven Grand Slam titles. Career Grand Slam. Australian Open champion this year after beating Novak Djokovic. Wimbledon titles. US Open title. World No. 1. All before 24. Read that again and it sounds like somebody’s career summary after retirement. But this isn’t his career summary.
This is where I think Carlos Alcaraz has made his own future a problem. Not because his future looks bad, but because it already looks so ridiculously good that we’ve started using it to judge his present. We have seen enough from him to imagine what the next five or ten years could look like, and now a 23-year-old losing a quarter-final somehow becomes a question about the career he hasn’t even had yet. We are looking at tonight’s Alcaraz while carrying every possible future version of him in our heads. That is a ridiculous amount of future to put on one tennis match.
This is what he has done before he has even reached what most people would consider the middle of a tennis career. And somehow those achievements have started working against him. We have taken everything ridiculous he has already done and quietly turned it into his minimum requirement. That’s the part that bothers me. A quarter-final for most players is a very good tournament. For Carlos Alcaraz, a quarter-final after four months out somehow needs an investigation. He doesn’t just lose a match anymore. He apparently has to explain why he lost it.
There is a weird trap here. Alcaraz’s best version has become so familiar to us that we now expect to see it every time he walks onto a court. We remember him playing impossible points, beating Djokovic, winning majors, producing those ridiculous rallies where he looks like he has discovered some secret setting on the human body. Then he has an ordinary match and suddenly ordinary looks wrong. It’s like watching somebody who has jumped over a six-foot wall and then getting annoyed when they don’t jump over it every morning on the way to breakfast.
We are comparing his normal days with the best days of his career. That’s an impossible comparison. And injuries make it even more ridiculous. He missed more than four months because of his wrist, returned to Grand Slam tennis and had to find his rhythm in front of 20,000 people in New York. He beat Jaime Faria, Roman Safiullin, Yibing Wu and Tommy Paul before Shelton finally stopped him. Four wins after that kind of break is actually a pretty decent way to come back. But because it is Alcaraz, four wins somehow feels like the warm-up before the real question: why didn’t he win the fifth?
And I think his own success has created another problem that nobody really talks about. His past has become the standard for his present. We aren’t judging the 23-year-old who is standing in front of us. We are judging him against every version of himself we have already seen. The Alcaraz who won his first Slam. The Alcaraz who beat Djokovic. The Alcaraz who completed the career Grand Slam. The Alcaraz who looked completely unplayable for stretches of matches.
All those versions are sitting in our heads at the same time, and then we look at him after a difficult night and wonder why he doesn’t look like all of them at once. That’s a pretty strange thing to ask of anyone. Imagine doing a job where your previous best performance follows you around every morning. You don’t even need your boss to tell you to do better. Your own highlight reel is already sitting on your desk.
The Shelton match itself actually makes this whole thing easier to understand. Alcaraz struggled physically, lost two sets badly, then fought his way back into the match and pushed it all the way to the final tiebreak. Shelton eventually won it. That’s it. There doesn’t have to be a hidden meaning attached to every part of it. Maybe Alcaraz wasn’t at his best. Maybe the long layoff mattered. Maybe Shelton was simply better when it mattered most. Probably all three things played some part. That’s sport.
Players have bad days. Bodies do weird things. Sometimes the guy on the other side of the net is simply better than you that night. You can play a decent match and still walk off the court having lost it. That’s sport. But we seem to find that explanation a little boring because there’s nothing much to argue about afterwards. ‘Ben Shelton played really well and Carlos Alcaraz lost’ doesn’t exactly keep a TV panel busy for three days. ‘What has happened to Carlos Alcaraz?’ does.
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But there is nothing wrong with Alcaraz being 23 and still figuring things out. In fact, it would be weird if he wasn’t. We talk about his seven Slams so much that we forget there is still a huge amount of career left for him to actually experience. He is going to have injuries. He is going to have bad stretches. He is going to lose matches he thinks he should have won. He is going to beat people when he probably shouldn’t. He will change parts of his game. He will probably change as a person too.
There will be years when everything clicks and years when it doesn’t. That’s what a career looks like when you’re actually living it rather than writing about it afterwards. The funny part is that we already know too much about Alcaraz’s greatness, so we have become impatient with the part where he is simply a young tennis player trying to work out what comes next.
Maybe that’s why this loss felt bigger than it really was. Alcaraz didn’t lose his career in New York. He lost a tennis match at 3:33 in the morning after coming back from a four-month injury layoff. Shelton hit a monster serve and won. Alcaraz will probably be furious about it for a while, then he’ll go home, rest, practise and eventually play another tournament. And at some point he’ll lose again. Hopefully we don’t turn that one into another emergency meeting about the state of Carlos Alcaraz. Because he is allowed to have bad nights. He is allowed to look tired. He is allowed to be beaten. He is even allowed to be 23.
Honestly, we may have made Alcaraz’s greatest problem ourselves. He has been so good that we no longer know how to look at him when he isn’t being spectacular. And that is probably something he will have to live with for the rest of his career. The rest of us could probably make his life a little easier by remembering that the seven Grand Slams are already there. He doesn’t have to win the eighth every time he picks up a racket just to prove they weren’t a fluke.
Amar Pal Singh Bhalla is a sports writer covering cricket, football and tennis.
Based in India, he has followed the game for the last few years and writes
match analysis, previews and features for Beyond The Score
