Royal road

Zverev has another golden opportunity to reach a Grand Slam final and should seize it.

Zverev has always been someone very consistent, who has often maintained a high level of play without ever managing to go beyond that. This season, he won his first Grand Slam title, but it's also worth highlighting that he reached the semi-final at the Australian Open and the final at Wimbledon. The German has clearly taken a step up and established himself as the third man behind Sinner and Alcaraz. With the Italian absent and Alcaraz having lost in the quarter-final, he is once again the favorite to win this tournament. His start to the tournament was a bit turbulent because of some marathon night-session matches, but he still managed to raise his level and then win in a much cleaner way. He comes into this stage of the competition relatively in form, even though he hasn’t had to beat a top player so far to get here. If I have to be critical, I find that his second serve really hasn’t been good in this tournament. He’s starting to hit double faults again and you can feel he’s increasingly shaky on that particular shot.

His path has been rather easy to reach the semi-final, and you could say exactly the same about Khachanov, who has benefited from several injured or diminished players and a draw that opened up. The Russian seized the opportunity thanks to his experience and his good management of this long format, which he handles perfectly. I’ve found him better in this tournament than he’s been since the start of the season, but that was expected, because in Grand Slams he always plays better. However, he will have to do even more to try to beat Zverev, a player he doesn’t particularly enjoy facing. He’s trailing 6–3 in their head-to-head, and Zverev mentioned that he wanted to insist on being aggressive from the baseline to stop Khachanov from dictating the game. The Russian likes to strike good shots from the back of the court and construct his points, so if Zverev puts him under a bit too much pressure and takes control of the rallies, while maintaining his superb serving quality, I don’t really see many options for Khachanov. Zverev would mainly have to mess up, completely miss his match, and we’d need to see the very best version of Khachanov. But I really don’t like the match-up for him.