Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz have been dominating tennis for the last two years, with Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal gone and with Novak Djokovic still trying hard, but in a clear, natural, and inevitable decline. Some are talking of a “Big Two” era, with Alexander Zverev getting closer, especially after his recent Roland Garros win and Wimbledon final.
Marat Safin, 46-year-old former Russian tennis player now the coach of Andrey Rublev, who won the US Open 2000, the Australian Open 2005, and two Davis Cup in 2002 and 2006, and was ranked World No. 1, believes that if Alcaraz and Sinner played during the Big Three Era, they wouldn’t be as good as any of them.
Speaking in a podcast with his sister, also former player Dinara Safina, Marat Safin said that if he had played with Sinner or Alcaraz, he would probably have lost to them, but both Sinner and Alcaraz would have lost to Roger Federer. “I think I probably would have lost to Sinner and Alcaraz, but I don’t see them as fearsome players. They’re not Federer, not at all. It’s a completely different level. To reach Federer’s level, they still have a lot to improve. I don’t mean to underestimate them, but that’s how I see it.”
Safin says both are “excellent players and have won many titles, but I don’t know if they would have won so many Grand Slams back then”, asserting that “if Sinner and Alcaraz had played during the Nadal and Djokovic era or at the beginning of the 2000s, they wouldn’t have been number one and two in the world and wouldn’t have gone so far”.
Safin is fairly critical with the level of tennis now, saying it has gone from thirty of fifty players in the elite, to just ten now. “Now you reach the semifinals or the final without losing a single set, and I find that ridiculous”.
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