Carlos Alcaraz says he has entered the ATP Finals “with motivation” as he moved a step closer to the year-end world number one ranking with victory over Alex de Minaur.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old Spaniard won his opening group match 7-6 (7-5) 6-2 in one hour and 40 minutes in Turin, Italy.<\/p>\n
Alcaraz is making his third appearance at the season-ending tournament but has never reached the final before.<\/p>\n
He withdrew injured in 2022, lost in the semi-finals on debut a year later and failed to qualify from the group last year.<\/p>\n
Alcaraz is battling rival Jannik Sinner for the top ranking, with the Italian moving back to the top spot after his victory at the Paris Masters last week.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been struggling in the past three years to come to the end of the year with energy and motivation. This year is a little bit different,” Alcaraz said.<\/p>\n
“I’m really proud about the way I’ve been doing things to come here with motivation.<\/p>\n
“I’m really excited and looking forward to playing great tennis, and giving myself a shot to try to win this tournament.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carlos Alcaraz says he has entered the ATP Finals “with motivation” as he moved a step closer to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-253558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}