Zverev Wins 1st Major Title at Roland Garros in Tense 5-Setter vs. Cobolli | Monday Match Analysis

**Gill Gross** (0:02)
Welcome, everyone, to Monday Match Analysis. I'm Gill Gross. Alexander Zverev is a slam champion. He wins Roland Garros. He beats Flavio Cobolli in a five-set final. And the longest-standing question in all my time covering tennis since about 2018 Will Alexander Zverev ever win a major? It has been answered in the Affirmative.
What an extraordinary match, certainly not on quality, but on spectacle of competition and drama. I'm excited to talk about it. Before that, a lot of big-picture stuff to discuss. How we got here, what it means for Zverev's legacy. We'll start there. We'll finish with the off-court controversy that follows Zverev and will also kind of affect how people engage with this result, at least some people. So, this is a game changer. If Alexander Zverev would never won a major, the tagline on his career was going to be, and you already sort of saw that at play, it was going to be he's the best to have never done it. Whether that would have been fair, not fair, that's what it was going to be. Sorry Marcelo Rios, I guess. I think Zverev took it to even another level. Somebody who's had the level of success at Masters 1000s and of course had been to three slam finals previously. Obviously, the circumstances were ripe for Zverev to ultimately and eventually do this, because it was not a matter of getting over the hump of Sinner or Alcaraz, or if we go earlier, or even Djokovic or Federer or Nadal, who may have stopped him a little bit earlier on in his career. That ended up not being necessary here. When the number is one, I will say context definitely gets attached. Stan gets extra credit. Now, he's won three, not one, but Stan gets a lot of extra credit, I think from a legacy standpoint, for having beaten Djokovic and Nadal. Delpo beat Nadal and Federer on the US Open run, and I think that's part of the reason why Delpo and Stan are lionized a little bit more. Cilic beat Federer in the semis at the US Open in 2014 Then he beat Nishikori in a surprise final. Medvedev beat Djokovic in the US Open final in 2021, when Djokovic was going for the calendar Grand Slam. I think Medvedev definitely gets the way that one major title is looked back on. There's some street cred there. This is a little bit like the team title. The legacy of this slam is chaos. The legacy of this slam is that a lot of stuff went down and created an opportunity for a lot of players.
Although team beat Medvedev and Zverev on that run. They were both firmly top five players.
Zverev.
I think this one major for Zverev, it will simultaneously completely change his legacy in a positive way.
And it will also be attached to the legacy of this year's Roland Garros. I think both things are true. All slams are not equal, but one slam is a galaxy away from zero slams. Always. It is a galaxy away. I think there's a big picture story here of how we got here. And then there's a small picture story of how we got here. And they are vastly different stories. In the big picture, I want to rewind to the beginning of Zverev's career.
Alexander Zverev had a lot of flaws in his game that he just didn't address. He didn't tend to. Not unlike many of the others in his generation.
He was 17 years old, already going deep in Masters 1000s. Federer, Nidal and Djokovic had dominated the era, but they were getting old.
And Zverev was anointed next, just like some of his peers were, like Stefanos Tsitsipas.
And it became a waiting game for those guys. And I believe that the assumption that Djokovic, Federer and Nidal were going to age out made them a little bit complacent when it came to addressing some of the holes in their game. There was very little transition. Actually, there was basically zero transition between, I'll say, Djokovic's dominance and the rise of Sinner and Alcares. Djokovic and Nidal's dominance, if you want to go to 2022, when Rafa took the first couple of majors of the year. There is no gap there.
Zverev, in this period of time, when he wasn't addressing his flaws, was dealt a couple of pretty hard blows in major finals, even in some major semifinals against Novak Djokovic.
And one of the things that Zverev has showcased is tremendous resilience, because I think some of Zverev's peers, I'll name drop Stefanos Tsitsipas again, they were beaten down by the disappointment of not emerging and not not rising to the top of the sport like they thought they were going to. And Zverev never really got fully discouraged. It didn't seem. Always bounced back even after some devastating defeats in major finals. But it wasn't just resilience, it wasn't just the ability to keep trying and to not get discouraged. I think that would be underselling it. Zverev had to address the issues that were holding him back. And he went to Majorca after Wimbledon last year to work with Tony and Rafa. And they told him a lot of things that he definitely had already heard about having conviction, about going for it in big moments. You started to hear Zverev in the last couple of years at least verbalize that that's been the problem. So he recognized the issue. He started seeing a psychologist. I don't know when that started, but it started at some point. That was something that I think everybody kind of agreed that he should probably do at some point. If you look at his game, he's a far better net rusher now than he was. He solidified his second serve. He committed to bravery on his forehand. Better acceleration, better racket speed on a more regular basis. More on the rise play, quicker to steal some time and improve court position at times.