On Sunday evening, Alexander Zverev, 26, strictly followed his father’s instructions in Melbourne. Because Zverev senior, as he explained to the audience in the Rod Laver Arena, is also his coach. The first piece of advice was to make more winning shots and fewer mistakes. The second order was: Hurry. “Nobody, my son,” the father said, “wants you playing until three in the morning.”
The match actually ended shortly after midnight. Zverev junior won 6:2, 7:6 (4), 6:2 against the American Alex Michelsen, meaning he reached the second week of the Australian Open tournament and the round of 16. “I felt good,” he said afterwards – and explained his noticeable increase in performance with a kind of natural law of Grand Slam tournament events: “The best players start to play the best tennis in the second week.”
His opponent Alex Michelsen was not the opponent Zverev expected at the start of the tournament, but this time he will have been warned. Just two days earlier, in the second round of the Australian Open, the number 163 in the rankings, Lukas Klein from Spisska Nova Ves in Slovenia, had taken him by surprise and rushed him into the tiebreak of a fifth set – a player he didn’t know how he later admitted. On the other hand, 19-year-old Alex Michelsen from Orange County in California had already noticed him in November: at the so-called NexGen Finals, the year-end tournament for young professionals in Saudi Arabia. To prepare for the match, Zverev studied excerpts from the game.
In the tiebreak, Zverev collects five points in a row
Michelsen only made his debut on the Grand Slam stage in August in New York. But in the rankings he has managed to move quickly from number 599 to 91 since 2022. The promotion encouraged him to turn professional instead of playing college tennis for the University of Georgia.
In the first set, which only lasted 36 minutes, Zverev had the tall youngster well under control. But in the second he showed his potential. He played his kind of California dream tennis: fast, loose, lively, carefree – with courageous smashes to the lines, but also with a corresponding number of mistakes. At 4:4 he took the serve from Zverev and took the lead for the first time. He also succeeded in passing shots in the tiebreak, he was already 4:2 ahead before Zverev, now highly concentrated, collected five points in a row and won the round. In the third set, Michelsen’s resistance was broken. Instead of four and a half hours as in round two, the day’s work was completed in a concentrated 119 minutes.
Statistically speaking, the draw is favorable for Zverev in what is now his ninth Grand Slam performance on the blue tennis courts on the Yarra River. Michelsen kindly got the theoretically most dangerous opponent, the Czech Jiri Lehecka, tournament winner in Adelaide two weeks ago, out of the way for him in time. And the predicted duel with Casper Ruud, number eleven in the world, will not happen either: the three-time Grand Slam finalist from Norway, who most recently lost to record champion Novak Djokovic in Paris 2023, failed early this time: he had to on Sunday beat 28-year-old Briton Cameron Norrie 4:6, 7:6, 4:6, 3:6.
The record against Norrie: four wins
This is also good news for Zverev: against the left-handed Norrie, who is always in the long shadow of the tennis giant and two-time Wimbledon winner Sir Andy Murray on the island, he won all four duels without losing a set. However, this time Norrie showed a completely new side in the match against Ruud: Instead of wearing down the opponent with tough baseline ball pushing, as usual, he presented himself as an offensive volley player, surprisingly often appearing at the edge of the net in front of Ruud. The tactic, Zverev said late in the evening, did not surprise him; he had already observed the change during training in the winter.
Also without much effort and in even less time, Carlos Alcaraz, last year’s Wimbledon winner from Spain, advanced to the round of 16 on Sunday. In a one-sided match, he ultimately benefited from the abandonment of his Chinese opponent Shang Juncheng (6:1, 6:1, 1:0), who at 18 is two years younger than himself. Alcaraz is in the round of 16 for the first time Australian Open, last year he didn’t come because of an injury. If he wins his game against Serbian Miomir Kecmanovic, there could be a duel with Zverev in the quarterfinals.