Jannik sinner has proven his mettle to the tennis world by his all-round game and great tennis acumen but 7-time Grand Slam champion Mats Wilander thinks the Italian will probably always be the second best to win French Open behind Carlos Alcaraz.
Sinner is currently the most dominant tennis force after starting his 2024 campaign with three titles and among those was his maiden major title at the Melbourne Park.
Building towards those successful title runs at Australian Open, Rotterdam Open and Miami, the 22-year-old has downed currently the best in the business including Novak Djokovic, Daniil Medvedev and Carlos Alcaraz as he took over the latter to sit at the #2 in ATP rankings.
However, all of those titles came on the hardcourts and as the tennis calendar enters the European clay swing, Wilander believes the Italian will need to find his feet on the dirt first before he can start thinking about taking the French crown.
“I don’t think Jannik’s going to walk into Roland-Garros as the favorite necessarily unless he puts together three or four great weeks on clay in the clay season beforehand,” he told Eurosport.
“When it comes to him on clay, he’s going to be compared to Novak Djokovic so many times in his tennis career. He plays more aggressively than Novak most of the time, but the defensive part of his game is very similar. That defense on a clay court doesn’t always work.
“When you’re not willing to step away from the baseline, there’s going to be times when the court is either too slippery or his opponent is playing too well, and so he’s not going to be the favorite at the French Open.
“If I was coaching Jannik Sinner, I’m hoping to see him continue his hard court tennis throughout the first few weeks of the clay court season.
“Keeping in mind, he’s very comfortable on clay being Italian, but I don’t think that he is able to win the French Open if he starts playing a little bit more passive, if he starts not controlling the point, because no matter how good he is at defending, defending with an open stance on the backhand on a clay court one metre behind the baseline is not going to be good enough against certain players on certain days.”
But while the Swede has faith in Sinner’s abilities to clinch Roland Garros and beat the 2-time Grand Slam champion Alcaraz in best of five-set clash, he feels the Italian will always trail the Spaniard at the Parisian clay for years to come. Sinner’s best result at French Open came in 2020 when he reached the final 8. Last year he fell to Daniel Altmaier in R2 of the event.
The former World No. 1 added: “I think Carlos Alcaraz will come into the French Open as a heavy, heavy favorited for many more years than Jannik Sinner.
“But that doesn’t mean that Sinner, over five sets, won’t win the French Open as many times as Alcaraz, because three out of five sets is a massive advantage for Sinner, being so level-headed the whole time.”