Zverev said this year’s Australian Open is the first time he has been playing “pain-free” in 12 months.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old tore ligaments in his ankle during his French Open semi-final against Rafael Nadal in 2022 – a career-threatening injury that kept him out of action for six months.<\/p>\n
“The last 10 days I felt healthy, and pain-free, which I haven’t felt in a long time. Probably in 12 months,” Zverev said after his win over Tien.<\/p>\n
“I feel like I’m happy on the court because I am playing pain-free and a good level.”<\/p>\n
Zverev has improved his serve in recent years, adding more consistency after double faults previously plagued his game.<\/p>\n
In 2020, when he reached the semi-finals in Melbourne and the final at the US Open, he was averaging 5.9 double faults per match.<\/p>\n
He has improved on that figure every year since and, in 2025, his average stood at 1.9.<\/p>\n
Zverev will face either world number one Carlos Alcaraz or sixth seed Alex de Minaur, the last Australian left standing in singles, in the semi-finals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zverev said this year’s Australian Open is the first time he has been playing “pain-free” in 12 months.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393133,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-393132","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\/393132","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=393132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}