While rehabbing, Draper joined The Tennis Podcast for a wide-ranging interview in November, and the same topic surfaced.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the most common questions we get from our listeners is: ‘Who’s gonna be the Djokovic, the third man, to enter the Alcaraz-Sinner duopoly the way Djokovic muscled into the Federer-Nadal thing?’\u201d co-host Catherine Whitaker told Draper. \u00a0\u201cAre you like: I want that to be me?”<\/p>\n
“Of course, yeah, but I’m also aware that there’s so many amazing young players,\u201d Draper replied.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’ve got like [Arthur] Fils, Fonseca, Mensik. You’ve just got so many young players who are being so professional and focused on that goal as well. And also players like [Daniil] Medvedev, and [Andrey] Rublev, [Stefanos] Tsitsipas, and [Taylor] Fritz; these guys who are gunning for them also.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“I think tennis is in a healthy spot right now. There’s a lot of healthy sort of competition to those guys.<\/p>\n
“But definitely with the way I saw my tennis going, and with my trajectory\u2026 I was feeling like I was improving all the time. Still far away, but I was getting closer. So I feel like if I can just get back on court, get doing what I can do out there again, then hopefully I can close that gap even more.”<\/p>\n
Come the main draw of Australian Open 2026, beginning in less than a month, we\u2019ll see if it\u2019s Draper, or one of those many other names, ready to stand up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While rehabbing, Draper joined The Tennis Podcast for a wide-ranging interview in November, and the same topic surfaced.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-360506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}