De Minaur will be among those willing Alcaraz to victory after maintaining his interest in the season-ending competition despite opening with back-to-back defeats.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old was reluctant to trust the news that he would qualify with an Alcaraz win when he was initially informed in his post-match interview.<\/p>\n
De Minaur had lost his past 16 matches against top 10 players, and each of the five matches he had previously played at the ATP Finals.<\/p>\n
A painful defeat by Musetti on Tuesday, in which De Minaur held a 5-3 lead in the deciding set before losing four consecutive games to concede the match, had rocked his confidence.<\/p>\n
But, against an opponent whom he had lost the two previous meetings, De Minaur reset mentally to produce an inspired display against Fritz. <\/p>\n
“It means a lot. A couple of days ago I was in a pretty dark place,” De Minaur told Sky Sports.<\/p>\n
“More than anything, I feel proud of my efforts. Not for just coming out and winning, but also the mindset. I made peace with what had happened and just committed.”<\/p>\n
Speaking in his post-match interview, he said on court: “I’ve dealt with a fair bit of heartbreak recently. <\/p>\n
“I’ve worked really hard, so it was good to get a positive reward for that.<\/p>\n
“[The loss to Musetti] was a tough pill to swallow. I didn’t overthink today, I just went out and committed to what I needed to do. I continued to back myself and, whether it worked or it didn’t, I was going to leave it all out there today.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"De Minaur will be among those willing Alcaraz to victory after maintaining his interest in the season-ending competition…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-289916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}