Shelton Wins Thriller Over Alcaraz at 3:30 AM | US Open 2026

Gill Gross (0:02)

Welcome, everyone, to Monday Match Analysis, brought to you by Fitnexa. I'm Gill Gross, coming to you from my Queen's Hotel Room after I just witnessed one of the greatest days of tennis I can ever remember at the US Open. Wasn't going to do a show today, changed that plan. Gonna squeeze it in. Don't have my organized notes. I've got a lot of thoughts running through my head. I hope I can put them together. I'm gonna try two incredible men's matches to talk about from yesterday. The first is the biggest win of Ben Shelton's career over Carlos Alcaraz in a fifth set tiebreak. The second is a two sets to love comeback by Frances Tiafoe against Alex Michelsen. First off, with the Alcaraz-Shelton match, this is a match that created so many moments, so many points, where you can just show anybody these points and say, if you don't like tennis, what the hell is wrong with you? Do you see what these people are doing? Are you looking at this?

Do you have eyes? How do you, like, how can you not be enthralled by this? So it was that kind of match, right? They played some unbelievable points because they're so creative and so explosive. I think through four sets, it was a somewhat, like, uneven match. I don't think it was the cleanest match, but the highs were unbelievably high. And then the fifth, despite the fact that it was two in the morning, was the best set. That was the set where I think both guys executed at the highest level at the same time.

Ben had, look, let me start here. I had a hunch that Ben was going to try to play solid, that he was going to try to be pretty patient and be steady from the back of the court, that he was going to prioritize that. I had that hunch based on the way he was playing over the summer, winning Canada, and then also talking to him ahead of the Alcaraz match, where I kind of baited him in my question, not in a bad way, but I said, I basically asked him, are you going to be more offensive? And I teed him up to say that I'm going to be more offensive, that you got to go after it, and he went the other way.

He said, no, actually, I'm an attacking player naturally. I need to focus on making the right choices and being high percentage. I didn't know if it was going to work or not. I didn't know if it was going to pay off. It did.

He was the more consistent player from the back of the court, and it allowed him to win enough exchanges, enough of the developed exchanges to ultimately win this match. Unforced errors, Alcaraz 53, Shelton 35 Is there an alternate reality where Carlos plays a whole lot cleaner on the forehand, and Shelton doesn't have nearly the success playing the lockdown baseline style? Definitely yes. Even if you look at the tiebreak, the 10-point tiebreak, Carlos made three forehand unforced. One of them was neutral. Two of them were kind of attacking. One backhand down the line approach shot that he missed long.

So, some sloppiness in the tiebreak from Alcaraz. If that doesn't occur, then Carlos wins. But you gotta give Ben credit for... You gotta give Ben credit because his approach worked. His approach worked last night. That's it. His forehand was reliable in all five sets. He started the tournament way off on the forehand. He was making a lot of errors in his first couple of matches. The Tsitsipas match was really the first match where the forehand was just there for him the whole time. And then he repeated that effort here.

The backhand had its moments, I would say. It's ups and downs.

But Ben was rewarded for his discipline in this match, trusting his athletic capabilities. Obviously not having to constantly play defense, right? Not being defensive. His enormous serve is first of all going to facilitate attacking tennis in his service games all the time. That won't change. In returns, again, he was, I'm not saying he was defensive. I'm saying he was selective. I'm saying that he didn't try to force anything. And as a result, he was the more solid player. Second key though was that his serve, his serve won, you know? Like his serve had an impact on the fifth set when Alcaraz cleaned it up, for the most part. I think Carlos, in the second set and the third set, we'll talk about this, Alcaraz was unbelievably error prone on the forehand. He cleaned it up in the fourth and the fifth. But especially in the fifth set where Shelton was down love 30 twice, was down break point once, his serve came through for him in all of these moments including the tie break where, of course, he finishes it with the booming ace. But again, if you just look at the first serve, it's totally incomplete because the second serve, to me, is what made the difference. It was disastrous that Alcaraz was standing up on the baseline. It didn't work.