Alex de Minaur went into his quarter-final with Jannik Sinner at the 2025 Australian Open hopeful that he could make life difficult for the defending champion. Not only did that not happen, but the manner of his one-sided defeat left him wondering if he really had the game to trouble the top players.
Fast forward a year and the Australian again finds himself in the last eight, again facing one of the sport’s superstars, this time Carlos Alcaraz. As with Sinner, the head to head doesn’t make pretty reading for De Minaur, with Alcaraz leading 5-0. This, though, is their first grand slam meeting and there is a growing feeling that things can be different.
Perhaps it’s because he’s playing the best tennis of his career. De Minaur enjoyed a slightly longer break than usual in the off-season, spending Christmas at home in Spain for the first time in nearly a decade. He won two matches at the United Cup and here, he has looked better than ever, losing just one set on his way to the quarters.
De Minaur takes defeats harder than most. Softly spoken, the 26-year-old gives himself a hard time when he doesn’t play the way he wants to. But there is a lightness about him this year, a realisation that if he plays the way he wants to play – more aggressively – and it doesn’t work, it’s not a mistake. “I need to give myself a pat on the back,” he said in the off-season. The epiphany – all tennis players know this but it tends to take them a long time to vocalise it – that focusing on results alone is not healthy has lifted his spirits and he seems to be walking taller than his 6ft-frame. Maybe it’s because he’s getting married this year, to fellow tennis player Katie Boulter, that he is seeing things this way.
And so he will step out on Rod Laver Arena on Tuesday evening, most likely with the roof closed due to predicted temperatures of more than 40C, confident that he will at least play well. That belief is backed up by the stats; he’s tied 12th in points won on first serve, with 79%, and tied sixth in points won on second serve, at 62%.
Former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash noted that De Minaur has altered his position on the baseline. “He’s not being pushed back behind the baseline,” Cash says. “He’s changed his core positioning. I don’t know exactly when, but certainly at Wimbledon, he was pretty good at that. And here he has just really nailed it. It’s really suddenly starting to work. Which means he looks like he’s attacking more, getting the ball back faster because of his core position. It’s very Andre Agassi.”
His returns have always been a strength, but De Minaur is taking things to a new level here. Across his four matches, he’s won 40% of points on his opponent’s first serve, the best in the field. On second serve, he’s tied 10th, with 57%. He’s going to need to return well, because Alcaraz has been serving especially well this fortnight, making 68% of first serves, enabling him to establish his superiority in the rallies, from where he can unload on his stunning groundstrokes and dictate the points.
Watching Alcaraz, it appears he has been playing within himself, not going for too much. He’ll need all his energy against De Minaur, who is perhaps the only man who covers the court even better than the world No 1. The squeaking of his shoes scuttling around the baseline at breakneck speed has been one of the sounds of this Australian Open.
The key for De Minaur, though, won’t be his speed or his returns. It will surely be his serve. Against Sinner last year, he pressed too much, missing way too many first serves, allowing Sinner to attack his second. In his two most recent battles with Alcaraz, his first serve percentage was just 52%. In his four matches at Melbourne Park, he’s averaging 62%.
It should help him that the match is at night and likely to start with the roof closed, denying Alcaraz the extra spin created by the heat of the day. Instead, conditions may help the Australian’s flatter groundstrokes shoot through. For all his brilliance, Alcaraz has yet to make it past the quarters here either, so it’s not a place he feels totally at home yet.
De Minaur has long said playing in Australia is a privilege, not pressure. For a long time, it seemed like those were just words, that if he repeated them enough, he might believe them too. For the first time, there is genuine belief that he can get the job done.
