Nice side of working late in January is that one can see some Australian Open, and that’s what I did yesterday, focusing on the match De Minaur won against Melzer. I saw the last hour of the match, basically starting from 5-3 to Melzer in the 4th set (which De Minaur won at the tie break) and the whole fifth set, easily won by De Minaur 6-1.
I take the occasion to write a few comments on this player, who is 17, ranks 333 ATP and 7 ITF junior (best ranking has been 4) and, most notably, was the runner up in last year’s Junior Wimbledon’s edition, having lost the final in three sets against Shapovalov (after having beaten good players as Blanch and Auger-Aliassime).
Before focusing on De Minaur let’s say something on his opponent, who was Gerald Melzer of Austria, currently ranking 87. He is a perfect opponent to judge a junior on, since he is a “normal” player, who doesn’t have a cracking serve, plays his game nice and solid, sometimes shows up at the net. I mean, there’s no real point to judge a 17 year old when playing against Djokovic: it is much better to test him against someone like Melzer. From 5-4 in the fourth set Melzer appeared to have suffered the adverse atmosphere: of course he had all the public against him, cheering loudly at every point of his opponent and every mistakes of his (but I must highlight that during the points there always was perfect silence: I don’t think that one can claim that yesterday’s public was disturbing or excessively unfair: they just did their normal job in supporting their own youngster). In any case, in the fifth set Melzer lost 11 points in a row, which cannot be a normal situation for a top 100 playing against a 17 year old guy.
By contrast, most probably De Minaur was in trans-agonistic mood: quite understandingly, in light of the situation. So, let’s focus on the kid. He is not the typical giant athlete of today’s time: he is fairly small and thin, being attested to be 1.80 tall and to weight 69 kgs on the ATP website: when seeing him on TV I thought he was even smaller, actually.
He hits a relatively soft first serve: seldom he breaks 180 kms p/h, most often he hits at 170 and several times at 160-150. Though he serves really neatly and precisely, being able to find remarkable angles or to place a central serve right on the T: due to this ability, he manages to serve more aces than one would expect and, definitely, to take some advantage when hitting a valid first serve.
From the backline he is solid both with forehand and backhand (two-handed), but I must say I did not see in De Minaur’s game any outstanding offensive solutions nor particular capability of changing a defensive situation into an offensive one. Nevertheless, Melzer had to win each point 4 times, in order to actually score a point; at the end of the fourth set stats showed 10 unforced errors by De Minaur – but please note that only a few more were attributed to his opponent. Instead, a feature that I don’t like of De Minaur is that he never comes to the net: only 6 times in the first 4 sets: I think that this limitation further narrows the offensive solutions available to him.
It’s very difficult to assess the future of a young kid: in De Minaur’s case, not being him physically outstanding, the assessment becomes even more difficult. The way I see it, assuming that he does not further grow in height/weight, if he does not develop more variations in his game, somehow – and I leave further possible evaluations on this to a coach – I assess him to have the potential to become a 60-70 in the world player (something which in Italy we would anyway dream of!). I wonder if in men’s tennis a less physically powerful player would be able still compete at top level, maybe relying on variations and touch, as Santoro did years ago and as Vinci or Radwanska still do in women’s tennis. In any case, I repeat, I did not see particular features in De Minaur’s game that differentiates it from the “mainstream game” played today, with the exception of his ability in nailing very precise first serves.
The fact that De Minaur has beaten in last Wimbledon a powerful player as Blanch (who digs holes in the ground with serve and forehand) does not change my view: it’s quite normal at junior level that a player as Blanch loses against De Minaur since, currently, Blanch is not able to hit more than 5 balls in the pitch in a row. But if Blanch becomes a good professional player, indeed those 5 good shots in a row will increase to 13, and for De Minaur it will become much harder to compete, by relying mostly on regularity and on running.
Of course if he, instead, builds up physically and develops more power, the above assessment may indeed change.
A final few less serious considerations: at court end changes, the guy eats more bananas than Michael Chang did at 17: he does not like those sticks (what are they, exactly?) that today’s players eat: I truly support him on this. Further he is one of the few players (together with Kasatkina and one cute Slovenian girl) to use a Technifibre, but I could not identify the model (it did not seem to me to be the T-Fight shown in the picture).
I like the guy because he is, is some ways, an unusual player, being a “human” and not superman who happened to find a tennis racket in his hand: I am curious to check what kind of results he can obtain. I anyway would like to follow further games from him, to check if there are some other features in his game that I did not notice yesterday.
Tommy Hemp
