Alex de Minaur’s second-round assignment at the Australian Open was like an AFL team playing West Coast in recent seasons, or an NRL team against the Wests Tigers.
He and we knew he would win, but he still had to play the match out, taking care to dot every i and cross every t. The opposition was a different league, but had their pride. Stranger things have happened. Fortunately, de Minaur is the least likely player to take another for granted.
American Tristan Boyer had lost in the first round of qualifying in all seven tour tournaments he had tried to enter before finally landing a place in the main draw here and marking it with a first-round win.
It is a slightly deceptive provenance. Like Jake Fearnley, conqueror of Nick Kyrgios, Boyer has been playing plenty of tennis, but in the US college system and on the Challenger circuit, where he won three titles last year. West Coast should be so lucky.
As the match began, there were rows of empty corporate seats at each end. Presumably the freeloading lunch fare was more tasty than this fixture. At the new-look Australian Open, many go to the tennis; fewer watch it.
Boyer is tall and gives the ball a decent thump. On a blustery afternoon on Rod Laver Arena, he broke de Minaur’s first service game, sending a stir around the stadium.
Alex de Minaur cruised to victory against Tristan Boyer.Credit: Chris Hopkins
It was like the Eagles kicking the first two goals of a game, or the Tigers scoring the first try – a false alarm. De Minaur made a stuttering start, but once he gave it a bit of choke, he purred. That’s an old-fashioned analogy, but he’s an old-fashioned sort of no-fuss player.
He said that if Boyer was able to keep up the standard for three or four hours, he would happily have gone to the net and said, too good. But he knew.
De Minaur won the next eight games in a row, six to close out the first set, consummated by four unreturnable serves in the last game, then the first two games of the second set. Boyer did not have another break point for the match as it took its inevitable course.
Boyer continued to give the ball a thump, but would not have been used to so many well-thumped balls coming back at him so quickly and so deep. It’s unlikely that college players passed him on the baseline as de Minaur sometimes did. He made 34 unforced errors to de Minaur’s 15. Stripped down to forehand errors, it was 21-6.
Boyer landed more first serves than de Minaur, but the Australian won vastly more of the serves he did land. As noted later, the new, improved de Minaur, now with added iron, has added speed and weight to his serve since last year, which means more free points and less scrambling to make position as the return comes to him. But he can still scramble with the best of them, too.
The lunch crowd eventually did straggle back in, but the match played out bloodlessly. Neither player said a word, and the crowd was so quiet that after breaking Boyer early in the third set, de Minaur gestured for them to raise their voices. It’s the eternal bind, that the good guy does not send pulses racing as surely as the bad guy does, unless the good guy is impossibly good – Roger Federer say, or latterly Carlos Alcaraz.
To round out a straightforward match, the straightforward guy did a straightforward on-court interview and a straightforward media conference. “Another day playing on RLA,” he said. “Happy to get the win. Happy to move on.”
You could say that, belying his “Demon” nickname, this tennis player is decent to a fault. It’s worth noting that if he can negotiate his way through the next two rounds, first against Argentine Francisco Cerundolo and possibly Russian-Armenian Karen Khachanov, the name of his quarter-final opponent is Sinner.
For now, suffice to say that de Minaur was happy to come away this day with the four points.
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