Shelton Bests Tiafoe, Setting Up First Slam Final vs. Zverev | US Open 2026

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Gill Gross (1:54)

Welcome, everyone, to Monday Match Analysis, brought to you by Fitnexa. I'm Gill Gross, coming to you from my Queen's hotel room. Actually, my last night here. I got some bonus action this year for US Open Radio. Usually, I'm out after the quarters. This year, I made it all the way to the semis, just like Karen Khachanov and Frances Tiafoe. But that'll be it for me. So I am on a flight home tomorrow. As a result, there won't be any coverage of the women's final.

But it was an honor and a privilege, as always, to be a tiny, tiny part of the US Open and to be at the event every day up until this point. Got to watch every ball of the women's semifinals last night, every ball of the men's semifinals today and tonight. So let's get into all that first. Let's talk about some of these matches. Beginning with the headliner from this incredible Friday evening, Ben Shelton, Frances Tiafoe, All American Semifinal, Electric Atmosphere. I thought the two delivered with a pretty phenomenal match. Really thought it was a great watch and a well-played match by both men. It was Frances Tiafoe taking the opening set with a very clear game plan, in my view, we're gonna play boring.

Frances in the past has struggled a little bit to play boring at times. Gets a little impatient, wants to kind of make something happen.

Play a drop shot or force a net rush or inject some pace into the rally. If you look at the first set that Tiafoe played, the plan was pretty clear. Let's play into Ben's backhand. Let's do it diligently. Let's do it patiently. Let's not get tired of doing it. Let's just stay there. And it worked. He got the misses out of that Shelton backhand wing. Different to how like Carlos Alcaraz was playing it. Carlos was playing through Ben's wing, but then attacking off of it rather quickly. Not necessarily staying there, right? He was getting to the Shelton backhand and then trying to attack off of the Shelton backhand. And just wasn't knocking down as many of those attacking opportunities as he would want. Some of them were there. Like some of them were pretty sound shot selection, green light balls. Maybe some of them were forced. But Tiafoe, Tiafoe approached it differently. He was going, you know, volume of balls. Unforced errors in the first set ended up being 14 to 3 Obviously with Tiafoe only making 3 and Ben making 14 So for Frances, it was really about, first of all, very low event tennis in terms of the errors. Keeping the mistakes to a minimum to a very impressive degree, which is something that I've talked about a lot. I think when Frances is actually at his best, but this is one of the main things that makes him tough to beat, is he does have the capacity to really keep the mistakes to a minimum. He certainly did it in the opening set. Remember Ray Sakamoto, that second round match? He only makes I think 13 unforced errors in that match. But it's a whole other thing doing it against Ben in the semi-final, and he did it first set, kept it really clean. Cat and mouse points were also going his way. He has better soft hands than Ben. I mean, Shelton is creative and daring and definitely is willing to kind of thrust himself into whatever situation presents itself and he uses all parts of the court. But from an execution standpoint, Frances has much silkier, softer hands, and it showed in some of those cat and mouse exchanges in the first set, which I thought Frances kind of dominated, even if it isn't always the biggest slice of the pie.