On the face of it, what Alex de Minaur thinks makes it possible for him to win a major one day is also what makes it nearly impossible.
“Anything can happen, right?” he said pre-tournament. “It is tennis at the end of the day. If it was strictly based on rankings, it would be quite a boring sport. But anything can happen.”
The trouble is that the rankings mostly do hold true.
Overwhelmingly, the winners of major championships come from the top six. Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz won all four last year as top-four players. For much of the two decades that the big three ruled, they ruled from the very top.
De Minaur is ranked eighth. Historically and mathematically, that says quarter-finalist, and that is where he has landed again, for the fourth time in a row and the first time at the Australian Open.
It’s no mean achievement in itself; when climbing Everest, base camp is a real milestone. Sometimes it takes more than one assault.
Alex de Minaur beat Alex Michelsen to advance to the quarter-finals of the Australian Open for the first time, where he will play Jannik Sinner.Credit: Eddie Jim
It means de Minaur is getting the absolute best out of himself every time. If only other players we could name could say as much about themselves. If only we all could.
But it’s not enough, either for him or us. As he said to Jim Courier on court: “I’m glad I finally made it to the quarter-final, but let’s go for bigger and better things. C’mon!”
Making your way up the rankings is like making money. When you get to the top 100, you want to be top 50. When you get to 50, it’s top 20, then 10. Beyond that, there’s the big trophies, and that means beating players you’ve never beaten before. That’s where de Minaur is now.
To look at him, you would say de Minaur needs a lucky break to lift a trophy. He has many assets as a player, but those above him have more. He doesn’t give himself airs and graces, which adds to the humble impression.
However, in this, there is a deception. Not so long ago, what de Minaur had was thought to be good enough only to get him to fourth rounds. The rankings said so, the record said so, we thought so.
But each year, he has added a bit more and gone a further round. This year, it is speed and accuracy of serve (though it was misfiring a little this night).
It’s not quantum improvement, but it is perceptible.
His return of serve is statistically the best in the game now, too. And he is stronger. He “has his legs back”.
“My whole career has been day by day,” he said on court. “It hasn’t been success overnight.” Everything had come in increments.
That all adds up to perennial quarter-finalist. So it is only natural for us to ask and him to believe that there might be more. If anyone can find it, he will.
There are expectations also of the man de Minaur beat this night, Californian Alex Michelsen, but he will have to grow into them. He’s 20 and baby-faced, but tall, and in this tournament was a giant killer, leaving in his wake top-20 players Stefano Tsitsipas and Karen Khachanov.
This night, he looked what he is, Alex, but five years behind.
De Minaur won the first eight games and had points to make it nine, and did not really have to do much more than play his standard game, minus his first serve, which was sputtering a little.
Michelsen’s lavish talent was evident, but his shot-making was wild. Some of his erratic play was due to de Minaur’s depth and precision, of course. It’s the Australian’s deceptive superpower. When it did all go wrong for Michelsen, he rolled his eyes like a … 20-year-old.
The crowd were stunned. They were getting what they wanted and what they didn’t want at the same time.
When all was almost lost, Michelsen at last found his range, and for a period controlled the match, until tensing up fatally at the end of the second set tie-breaker.
Momentarily the crowd were getting neither what they expected nor wanted.
De Minaur turned to them for moral support.
But the third set played out more like a conventional round-of-16 encounter at a major. Both hung tough, and point by point, it came down to margins.
De Minaur’s consistency, forever and a day the difference between the seasoned player and the greenhorn, told.
As speedily as Michelsen surged, he receded, just a bit, and when he did, de Minaur was still there, doing his thing.
The most salutary statistic was for unforced errors: de Minaur 25, Michelsen 50. The most troubling was De Minaur’s first-serve percentage: 42.
So having secured the straight sets win, de Minaur was somewhat muted.
He’s now one of only half a dozen Australian men to have driven this far into the tournament in all four majors in the Open era.
He knows the way here. It’s what comes next that will tell the story of his career, in this tournament and across the year and the years to come.
It begins with Sinner.
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