How to win a tennis match: The art of closing a Grand Slam final and managing pressure

PARIS — At some point this weekend, a man and a woman are going to have to do something they have never done.

They are going to have to seize the biggest opportunity of their tennis lives, and close out a match to win a Grand Slam title. One of Mirra Andreeva and Maja Chwalińska, and one of Alexander Zverev and Flavio Cobolli, will do it. The same player, and perhaps their opponent too, may pass up one, two, or several opportunities along the way.

At the French Open, that task has gotten the better of the best. Decades from now, Jannik Sinner may still have last year’s men’s final playing behind his eyes. The Italian world No. 1 saw a two-set lead and three championship points slip away against his nearest rival, Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz.

Sinner, who this year lost to Argentina’s Juan Manuel Cerúndolo in a stunning second-round upset, will find plenty of empathetic souls in the locker room by the time this year’s edition of Roland Garros is over.

Tommy Paul of the U.S. did not convert two match points in the fourth set of the third round, and lost in five to Norway’s Casper Ruud. Paul’s compatriot, Frances Tiafoe, was two service breaks up, and then two points from the finish line, in the fourth set of his fourth-round match against Italy’s Matteo Arnaldi.

He turned tentative, lost five of the next six points, and slid to a five-set defeat.

For defending champion Coco Gauff, closing is the reason her title defense ended in the third round. The American used to have a trick. In the third set, as the end drew near, she would pretend that the match had no finish line, with many more sets to win.

That train of thought eluded her against Anastasia Potapova, the Russian-born, free-swinging Austrian, who stormed back from a break down in the third set to out-compete the woman whose game is built on out-competing everybody else.

When it was over, Gauff said she grew less comfortable as the finish line came within site, instead drawing confidence from the feel of the wind at her back.

“I think that’s maybe the issue too,” she said in a news conference. “When I see the momentum is on my side, I should keep putting my foot on the gas instead of maybe letting up a little bit, and I think that’s what I did.”

She wanted to feel like Potapova did, playing free as players so often do when they are behind. She knows what it feels like. She does it all the time. She’d even done it when she came back to level the score in the first two sets.

“I need to figure out how to make that mental switch of keeping that level of play when I do have the lead,” she said.

Nothing in tennis may be more difficult, because mastering it involves solving one of the great riddles of the sport. The mantra of the tennis champion is to play point by point, taking each one on its own merits. But is it truly possible for tennis players to believe that all points are created equal, when the situations they face are so wildly different?

A game point is one point. It is also worth some fraction of a set. A set point is one point. It is also half a match, or a third, or a fourth, or a fifth, depending on the format and scoreline. A match point is one point. It is also success or failure.

A championship point is one point. It is also some combination of relief, eternal glory, salvation, legacy, the fulfilment of a dream and life-changing emotions and consequences of all kinds.

And on all these kinds of points, the sport’s numerous and competing pressure dynamics are coursing around the stadium. The pressure of expectation as a favorite; the freedom and inexperience of being an underdog; and the scoreboard pressure of being ahead or behind. They mutually warp each other into a maelstrom, which reaches its crescendo when it is time to close.

Rafael Nadal, the 22-time Grand Slam champion, with 14 of them in Paris lived his views on the matter by inverting this paradox. To Nadal, it made sense to play every point as though it were the last one.

Nadal was also a player who calmed himself through matches with a series of tics and obsessive routine. Just about everyone feels those final points and games of a tennis match differently, in the same way that pitchers experience the final three outs of a baseball game.

There’s a reason baseball created a special statistical category for finishing a game, as well as the name for the pitcher whose job it is to do that work — the closer.

At this year’s French Open, Aryna Sabalenka, the women’s world No. 1, a four-time Grand Slam champion and the title favorite, was a set and two service breaks up against Diana Shnaider of Russia in her quarterfinal.  She looked like a lock to make the semis.

The wind, her kryptonite, was starting to whip harder, but serving at 6-3, 4-1, 30-0, Sabalenka was two points from a four-game cushion. It was time to close in miniature.

She couldn’t do it. Then came the second opportunity. 6-3, 5-4, 30-15. Two points from the match, again.

Sabalenka pulled Shnaider off the court, opening up the space she needed to send a forehand volley into an ocean of unguarded clay. Instead, she tried to drop it short into a far smaller target, and the ball floated wide:

Then came a slapped forehand into the net, followed by a meek ball to the middle of the court that Shnaider put away into the corner. That took the score to 5-5, and Sabalenka did not win another game, one more Grand Slam opportunity slipping into the wind on Shnaider’s 3-6, 7-5, 6-0 win.

Paul, the 29-year-old American who has spent the season riding the roller coaster of losing match points and stealing matches, and even a title, by saving them, was as blunt as it gets when asked if points at what seems like the end feel different.

“Yeah, totally,” he said ahead of the French Open, words he would understand on a newly nightmarish level a few days later when he could have used a closer to come out of the bullpen and slam the door shut.

No such luck in tennis. There are no substitutions and no relief players who come on to get the match across the finish line.

On Monday, closing stress nearly caused some major problems for No. 10 seed Cobolli, who came within a whisker of losing control of his fourth-round match against Zachary Svajda of the U.S., a heavy underdog. Cobolli was up two service breaks, with a 2-1 lead in sets,when everything started to go in the wrong direction.

“I was sh––––– on my pants,” he told the crowd twice on Court Philippe-Chatrier after surviving, 6-2, 6-3, 6-7(3), 7-6(5).

A little while later, he explained what had happened to him and what has happened to so many others. He started to think.

“That’s the problem with, I think, with my character, because I don’t like to think a bit,” he said in a news conference. “I just want to play.”

Cobolli’s compatriot, Sinner, went through a similar self-appraisal after last year’s epic final. He and his team took comfort in having taken part in one of the great matches in the history of tennis, but after a week or so, they convened to discuss what had gone wrong. One of Sinner’s two coaches, Simone Vagnozzi, said during an interview last summer that it was simple.

Sinner needed to be a little more courageous in the important moments, and few are more important than holding three championship points against your only real peer in a duel for the history books that will unfold over the next two decades. He has done exactly that, negating some of the scar tissue of that final by beating Alcaraz from a set down to win Wimbledon just a few weeks later.

At the Miami Open in March, when Sinner was in the middle of a 30-match win streak, he elaborated on exactly how he had made sure not to fritter away a match since that final, which includes going 16-3 in tiebreaks.

He tries to enjoy crunch time. He always has. His best line to date, “dancing in the pressure storm,” explains all that. But he also looks for brighter things.

In Miami, he saw the sun emerge from the clouds when an opponent was serving with the sun in his eyes during a tight moment. He tries to understand that whatever pressure and nerves he might be feeling, his opponent is probably feeling them, too, especially in a tiebreak.

“Serving out is always a little bit different, you can feel the pressure, and that’s everyone, me too,” he said during a news conference. “But, look, also sometimes you can miss balls, and if he wins that game, you know things can be different. But you can start from 0-0 again.”

And unlike Cobolli, thinking is an essential part of his strategy. Sinner assesses what he has been doing well, and what his opponent has been finding difficult, and tries to do those things with even more intensity.

Russia’s Anna Kalinskaya had that on her mind when got she got near the end of her wild quarterfinal against Potapova last week, when each player kept coming from behind to overtake the other one.

In an interview after she won the match-deciding tiebreak, Kalinskaya, the No. 22 seed,  said she told herself to keep Potapova on the run, because she didn’t seem like she wanted to run anymore.

“Three sets, almost a three-hour battle,” she said. “I knew she was tired. Just moving her and trying to finish the ball.”

By the final points, Potapova appeared miserable, yelling at herself and her coaches after nearly every lost point.

In all these psychological maneuvers, Sinner does have one key advantage: Being Jannik Sinner for the past three years. He has the talent and the record to experience closing out a match with a confidence that other quality players, who can play great tennis but have not done it in so many huge moments as he has, have to work a little harder to find. He has also used that talent to heal his scar tissue, which can throb in all kinds of situations.

There are ways to acquire that experience quickly. Chwalińska, the 24-year-old Polish world No. 114 who had never been past the second round of a Grand Slam until the past fortnight, has closed the five biggest matches of her life in the space of just over a week.

Paul has endured both sides of the close-out equation this year. He was up 6-2 against France’s Arthur Fils in a deciding-set tiebreak in the Miami quarterfinals, but lost six consecutive points, and the match. Ten days later he saved three championship points against Argentina’s Román Andrés Burruchaga in the final of the U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship in Houston.

The week before the French Open, he saved match points on his way to the final of the Hamburg Open in Germany. In Paris, he couldn’t take two match points against Casper Ruud in the third round, and lost in five sets.

A couple of months removed, the memory of Miami is a little less raw. During an interview, Paul recalled trying to stay loose on his first match point. He probably went too loose — “loosey-goosey,” he said.

After losing the second one, Paul started to descend into the closer’s psychological doom loop. He found himself hoping for an error from Fils, rather than telling himself to take the match on his own racket. Still, if Fils hit a great shot, more power to him.

And then he did: A wild backhand crosscourt passing shot on the full run.

Paul was in trouble. As a match winds down, he has routines to put in place And then, somehow, “all that kind of goes out the window when it’s somebody serving for the match.”

“You so badly want to put a first serve in. Then that doesn’t happen,” he added. “You have a couple of second serves, and your mind can go a little crazy,” he said.

Sabalenka described the spiral after her loss to Shnaider like this in a news conference: “You overthink, then you make easy mistakes, then you, I don’t know, you miss opportunities.

“Then the other player on the other side is kind of stepping in, and starting to play a bit more aggressively and more free, kind of fearless. You know, sometimes it’s really tough to hold the pressure and put it back on the opponent.”

The only good thing, Paul said, is that he has been able to put his experience in failing to close out matches to work when he is on the other side of the coin, and trying to keep them going. He plays it simple, and tries to make the other guy make a lot of balls.

That was the formula that doomed Alexander Zverev six years ago, during a tournament markedly similar to this French Open. After the fourth round, there were no men’s tennis superpowers left. Roger Federer was injured. Nadal skipped it to prepare for the French Open, scheduled to start two weeks later. Novak Djokovic got defaulted for accidentally swatting a ball into the throat of a line judge.

Zverev arrived in the final to face Dominic Thiem, who was in the role Zverev finds himself in for 2026: The favorite. Zverev went up two sets to love. Thiem pegged him back. Then, in the eerie vacuum of a near-empty Arthur Ashe Stadium, both men put on a clinic of how not to win a Grand Slam title. The match devolved into a timid slice-fest of points started by meek serves, as both men desperately tried not to lose.

In a fifth-set tiebreak, Thiem found just enough nerve to crack a couple of groundstrokes, before he collapsed on his back in the relief of victory.

This year, with Alcaraz sidelined, and Sinner and Djokovic out, Zverev, now a four-time Grand Slam finalist and the No. 2 seed, has been the favorite. He has been promising himself to do whatever he can to avoid a repeat of that 2020 U.S. Open final, and even the semifinal of this year’s Australian Open, when Alcaraz cramped up with a 6-4, 7-6(5), 4-4 lead.

Zverev took too long to win the third and fourth sets, letting a hampered Alcaraz get to two tiebreaks. The time on court was also time for the Spaniard to recover full control of his limbs, and he surged back to break Zverev as he served for the match, and again to win in five sets.

Zverev, a 29-year-old German, hopes experience — more than 800 matches with every kind of outcome — will pay off if he gets to the cusp of his first Grand Slam title Sunday, a game and then a point with a lifelong dream and $3.26 million riding on it.

“Sometimes I close out matches like I did today, sometimes I don’t, like against Carlos in Australia,” he said during an interview at the Miami Open earlier this year.

“Maybe I’m not that smart,” he said, “but in those moments really all I can focus on is on the ball toss. Hit the serve, hit the spots, and hopefully it makes life easier.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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