World number one Carlos Alcaraz felt “relieved” after he battled back from a set down to edge out Taylor Fritz in a thrilling contest and close on a place in the knockout stages at the ATP Finals in Turin.<\/p>\n
With his victory, Alcaraz also moved within one win of securing the end-of-year world number one ranking in his battle with Jannik Sinner for that honour.<\/p>\n
American sixth seed Fritz, the 2024 runner-up, matched Alcaraz for much of their two hours and 48 minutes together on court.<\/p>\n
But the Spaniard, as he so often does, found another gear to turn the match around and complete a 6-7 (2-7) 7-5 6-3 win.<\/p>\n
“It was tight. I felt I was running more than him, struggling more than him,” Alcaraz said.<\/p>\n
“I was really relieved after the win because of everything I went through physically. I’m really happy that I found a way to come back and find his weaknesses.”<\/p>\n
On being one win away from clinching the year-end world number one ranking, Alcaraz added: “I try not to think about it. It is going to be a really big match for me [against Lorenzo Musetti in his final group game] and I will try not to let nerves give me a bad time.”<\/p>\n
Both players were seeking consecutive victories, after Alcaraz beat Australian Alex de Minaur and Fritz also won in straight sets against Italy’s Musetti.<\/p>\n
Victory for De Minaur against Musetti in Tuesday’s other match in the Jimmy Connors Group would confirm Alcaraz’s place in the last four before his final round-robin match against the Italian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number one Carlos Alcaraz felt “relieved” after he battled back from a set down to edge out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-257342","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\/257342","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=257342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}