A tennis season conspicuously light on Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner has turned into a career year for Alexander Zverev. And he has neither player in front of him with two matches to go at the US Open.
Zverev, the No. 1 seed at Flushing Meadows, took care of business in the quarterfinals against the unseeded Botic van de Zandschulp on Wednesday, winning 6-2, 7-5, 6-1 in two hours and 17 minutes. He will face another unseeded player, Karen Khachanov, in the semifinals on Friday.
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No. 8 Ben Shelton and No. 11 Frances Tiafoe are waiting on the other side of the bracket, after a pair of dramatic five-set wins on Tuesday.
Zverev has a career 6-3 record against Khachanov, who reached his third career Grand Slam semifinal earlier Wednesday after young standout Alexander Blockx retired in the third set due to a rib injury.
Van de Zandschulp entered the match after back-to-back five-set wins in the previous four days, and any hope for an upset receded when Zverev broke him in his third service game.
Zverev continued to do what has made him so successful this season, pairing a lethal first serve with the ability to dig in and extract mistakes from his opponent. Van de Vandschulp reached only two break points against him, winning neither.
That gave Zverev a comfortable path to victory, though he did have to save a set point with his serve in the second frame. He responded with a late break of van de Zandschulp, ending the closest thing to peril he experienced all match.
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Zverev had some double-fault issues early, with five in the first set, but he still managed to land 70% of first serves and win 77% of those points overall, with eight aces.
Alexander Zverev is two matches from repeating his Roland-Garros triumph, including its degree of difficulty
The win clinches a full sweep of Grand Slam semifinals in 2026 for Zverev for the first time of his career.
He fell short of a comeback against a hobbled Alcaraz in the Australian Open semifinal. He triumphed in a depleted field at Roland-Garros. And he got overwhelmed by Sinner in the Wimbledon final.
This Slam is shaping up to be more like the one in Paris.
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The draw was noticeably friendly to Zverev from the outset, and then even more potential hurdles fell early on. By the end of the second round, Zverev’s highest-possible seeded opponents in the fourth round (No. 13 Lorenzo Musetti), quarterfinals (No. 6 seed Alex de Minaur) and semifinals (No. 3 Felix Auger-Aliassime) were all out of the tournament.
There is no Alcaraz waiting for him, after the Spaniard’s epic loss to Shelton on Tuesday (and Wednesday). There is no Sinner, with the Italian missing the tournament due to a knee issue.
If Zverev reaches the finals, his strongest opponent by seed will have been No. 21 Luciano Darderi, a clay specialist with an ATP career 19-37 record on hard courts. He got pushed to five sets in his first- and second-round matches against Lorenzo Sonego and Quentin Halys, but it has been three straight-set wins since then.
The field was similarly friendly at Roland-Garros, with No. 26 Jakub Mensik representing the high mark before No. 10 Flavio Cobolli in the final. That was Zverev’s long-awaited first Grand Slam title at age 29, allowing him to finally shed his mantle as the consensus best player to never win a major. There can be some snipes over the legitimacy of that title, but tennis is ultimately about beating the player in front of you. Zverev did that, convincingly.
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Khachanov at least represents a challenge greater than your usual unseeded opponent, as implied by his presence in the semifinals. In addition to being a former top-10 player, he’s the one who took down Auger-Aliassime in the second round, and he also defeated No. 14 Learner Tien in a fourth-round five-setter.
The Russian hasn’t had the most successful season — he was one-and-done in his previous three tournaments — but he’s also been on stages like this before. His previous two Grand Slam semifinals saw him lose to Casper Ruud in the 2022 US Open and Stefanos Tsitsipas in the 2023 Australian Open.
Zverev will still be the heavy favorite on Friday, with a guarantee to face a hungry American and a hostile crowd in the final. That at least figures to be some good theater, though he also has a career 5-0 record against Shelton and a 9-1 record against Tiafoe.
Source: sports.yahoo.com
