Picking EVERY Men's QF at US Open 2026 | Monday Match Analysis

Gill Gross (0:00)

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Welcome everyone to Monday Match Analysis brought to you by Fitnexa. I'm Gill Gross and I will be previewing every men's quarterfinal at the 2026 US Open. Picking them, in fact. Excited to riff on four very interesting matches, but I do want to start the show with a correction and an apology. Carlos Alcaraz did not have wrist surgery. So, unforced error by me there. I'm sure if you would have asked me, hey, Gill, did Carlos Alcaraz have wrist surgery? I would have said no, he did not. But in the flow of speech, without really thinking much of it, I said it twice on the show. So, apologies for that. Bad, bad miss. Overhead in the net on my part. All right, we're going to go reverse chronological order in terms of the quarterfinals to maximize shelf life. So, with that said, let's begin with Khachanov vs. Blockx. I also want to kind of address some of the fourth round matches. I won't talk about all of them. But in this case, I was courtside for the fifth set of Khachanov beating Lerner Tien, a much needed fifth set win, five set win for Khachanov for a couple of reasons. One, it's been a pedestrian year for Khachanov. He came into the US. Open with a below 50% win rate for the year. And also, he's had a lot of five set heartbreak at the Slams in the last couple of years, including I think his last two exits at the US. Open, the Dan Evans loss and last year against Maishruk. So big one for Karen, to say the least. I spoke with him after the match, and one of the things I asked is about his racket change.

Because obviously, it was clear that he was using the Defyre. He was one of the first players to pick up the new Wilson prototype, which we were calling the Cobra, the Pure Arrow kind of imitation by Wilson. I don't know if, maybe the people at Wilson wouldn't be thrilled with that characterization of the racket. That's kind of what it was. It's kind of their version of the Pure Arrow. Khachanov is one of the first to pick it up. He initially had great results with it. But coming into this US Open, he went back to a racket that very much looked like his old racket, the Blade Pro, otherwise known as the H22. But for our purposes, back to the Blade, right? Asked him after the match, and he told me something very interesting. He said, I'm actually not back to using my old racket. In fact, I'm using slash testing was the word he used. He said testing. I'm testing a racket that's something in between my old racket and the new racket that I was using, the Defyre. When he says in between, I would strongly assume that he means in the power department, because the Defyre is a much more powerful frame than the Blade Pro that he was using. So he's looking for a happy medium. This racket switch happened a few days before the US. Open. So that is a big part, I think, of why he's found his groove here off the ground. Honeymoon phase, right? I'm not saying that because of this racket change, Khachanov is about to have this massive resurgence for months to come or years to come. But I am saying when you make a racket change three days before an event and then have your best tournament of the season, the racket probably had something to do with it. And it can be very psychological. All right, but it was a great job by him sustaining offense without missing because Tien was in ball retriever mode, lockdown mode in the fifth set. Was he tired? Of course he wasn't tired. He was running all over the place, corner to corner, making it really hard for Khachanov to finish. And look, for Karen, he does not have the luxury of coming forward and knocking off volleys. He does not have the luxury of having a good drop shot to use when an opponent has really drifted back in order to really absorb a barrage of offense. So he does not have a lot of options.