In the first of his annual three-part review of the past year, Martin Keady, our resident tennis historian, looks back at the best things in the sport in 2025.<\/p>\n
Ten Terrific Things In Tennis In 2025
\n1. The Men\u2019s French Open Final <\/p>\n
There is only one place to start any review of the past year in tennis and that is the truly great Men\u2019s French Open Singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner<\/a>, which Alcaraz eventually won on a match tie-break after more than five and a half hours. It was the finest tennis match of the year, almost certainly the greatest Men\u2019s French Open final ever, and the occasion that proved conclusively that the era of The Big Three was over and the era of The Huge Two<\/a> had begun.<\/p>\n Perhaps most importantly, though, the 2025 Men\u2019s French Open Final was a vital reminder of the unique beauty of five-set tennis. The Majors are now the only events in men\u2019s tennis that are still played over five sets and long \u2013 indeed, eternally \u2013 may that continue. It is only over the course of five sets, which invariably will be played out over as many hours, that tennis separates itself from all other sports and genuinely approaches the realms of epic art, such as a great Shakespeare play or Dickens Novel. Yep, the 2025 Men\u2019s French Open final was that good and hopefully there will be similarly epic encounters between Alcaraz and Sinner in the years, if not decades, ahead.<\/p>\n Madison Keys Winning the Australian Open Women\u2019s Singles Title <\/p>\n Having been tipped to win a Major for nearly a decade, Madison Keys finally captured one in Melbourne at the end of January. And the wait was absolutely worth it, as she won her maiden Major in extraordinary fashion, surviving matchpoints against her in both the semifinal (against Iga Swiatek) and the final (against two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka). If it wasn\u2019t quite as epic a triumph as Carlos Alcaraz\u2019s in Paris a few months later, it was the closest that any other tennis player got to a truly epic achievement in 2025. And it obviously meant all the more to Keys after so many near-misses and even horror-shows, especially in the 2017 US Open final, over the years.<\/p>\n At the time, it was widely believed that Keys would go on to win multiple Majors, having finally got the \u201cfirst Major\u201d monkey off her back. However, that did not prove to be the case in 2025, as she performed indifferently, to say the least, in the year\u2019s other Majors, culminating in a disappointingly early exit from her home Major, the US Open, after which she admitted to being consumed by nerves. Clearly, finally winning a Major title has not solved all of her problems, but it certainly solved the biggest one.<\/p>\n The Ultra-Competitiveness of Women\u2019s Tennis <\/p>\n Part of the reason that Keys struggled at the year\u2019s other Majors after winning in Melbourne was that so many other female players also stepped up to challenge what had appeared to be a duopoly in women\u2019s tennis in recent years, with Iga Swiatek dominating on clay, Aryna Sabalenka dominating on hardcourt and Wimbledon the unpredictable outlier, as was proved again this year when Swiatek finally won the grasscourt Major that she had never thought she would win.<\/p>\n The ultra-competitiveness of women\u2019s tennis<\/a> was in stark contrast with the genuine duopoly that Sinner and Alcaraz have established in men\u2019s tennis, whereby for the second year in succession they split the year\u2019s four Majors between them. That ultra-competitiveness also made a mockery of the forthcoming \u201cBattle of the Sexes II\u201d between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios, which is yet another example (after \u201cWoodstock \u201999\u201d, \u201cAnthology IV\u201d et al) of the present seemingly having run out of ideas, to the extent that it can now only recycle events from the past without recreating any of their original social and cultural importance. Thankfully, the recent announcement of Mercedes\u2019 title sponsorship of the WTA Tour was an infinitely more valuable validation of the sheer competitiveness of women\u2019s tennis.<\/p>\n Jack Draper\u2019s First Half of the Year <\/p>\n Jack Draper must wish that the tennis season did not run from January to November but, like most professional sports, from one summer to the next. That is because his sustained excellence between the 2024 US Open to the summer of 2025 made him probably the third best male tennis player on the planet in that period, behind only Alcaraz and Sinner.<\/p>\n That superb run encompassed Draper\u2019s maiden Major semifinal in 2024, a first ever Masters win at Indian Wells in March 2025<\/a> and even \u2013 uncharacteristically for a Briton \u2013 prolonged success on clay, including a run to the Madrid final. However, just as it seemed that Draper was finally putting behind him all the physical issues that have plagued him throughout his career so far, they returned with a vengeance, effectively curtailing his season halfway through it. As he rebuilds towards full fitness and full form for the start of the 2026 Australian Open next month, he (and we) can only hope that he can maintain his fitness for a whole\u00a0season and finally challenge Alcaraz and Sinner on an ongoing basis.<\/p>\n Aryna Sabalenka Finally Winning The Major That Her 2025 Deserved<\/p>\n For all the fantastic competitiveness of women\u2019s tennis in 2025, as shown by the fact that there were four different winners of the year\u2019s Major Singles titles, one woman was really first among equals, and that was Aryna Sabalenka. Indeed, the World No.1 might even have won a Calendar Grand Slam, the Holy Grail of Tennis<\/a>, as she lost in the finals of Melbourne and Paris and the semifinal at Wimbledon. Thankfully, she finally won the Major that her 2025 deserved at the US Open in September, retaining her title in New York despite the most spirited of fights by Amanda Anisimova.<\/p>\n Sabalenka had been so dominant throughout 2025, in particular distancing herself from Swiatek while the former World No.1 continued to struggle with a new coach (at least until her surprise Wimbledon triumph), that it would have been a travesty if she had ended the year without a Major title. Finally, after the heartbreak and tantrums of Paris and the near-miss against Anisimova in the Wimbledon semifinal, Sabalenka rubber-stamped her dominance, particularly on hardcourt, by winning the US Open in September. For the future, the challenge remains for her to translate that hardcourt supremacy into success on either (or both) clay or grass. But for the present, she remains the hardest woman to beat, especially on hard.<\/p>\n Flavio Cobolli Leading Italy to a \u201cThreepeat\u201d in the Davis Cup <\/p>\n In general, 2025 was not a good year for sportspeople or sports teams trying to achieve a hat-trick of titles, or \u201cthreepeat\u201d (as hat-tricks are so often referred to nowadays in sport). There were numerous examples, both in tennis in particular and in sport in general, of players or teams falling at the final hurdle of three: in tennis, Aryna Sabalenka and Carlos Alcaraz failed to achieve title hat-tricks in Melbourne and Wimbledon respectively; and in the wider sporting world, the failed \u201cthreepeaters\u201d included the Kansas City Chiefs in the NFL and the Irish men\u2019s rugby union team in the Six Nations Championship.<\/p>\n Consequently, when Jannik Sinner withdrew late in the year from Italy\u2019s Davis Cup defence and Italy\u2019s No.2 man Lorenzo Musetti also pulled out after an exhausting end to the season, there were grave doubts that the Italian men\u2019s team could continue the \u201cTenaissance<\/a>\u201d of recent years. However, cometh the hour, cometh The Third Man, as Flavio Cobolli superbly led Italy to a third Davis Cup title in succession<\/a>. It won\u2019t be easy for him to follow in the footsteps of compatriot Sinner and Novak Djokovic by translating team tennis triumph into individual Major glory. However, after his impressive 2025, which also included a run to the Wimbledon quarterfinals, Cobolli will surely feel that anything is possible.<\/p>\n Jasmine Paolini Winning In Rome (and Shenzhen)<\/p>\n