After being World No.11 for some time now, Australian tennis sensation Alex de Minaur is back into the top 10 of the ATP rankings. The 25-year-old is one of the hot topics of tennis at present because of reaching his career-best ranking of No.7. After de Minaur won his second ATP title of 2024 in the Netherlands, Brett Connors and his dad Jimmy Connors talked about the same in the latest episode of their podcast, Advantage Connors.
Jimmy Connors, the American tennis legend who has had a taste of being World No.1 in men’s singles, lauded Alex de Minaur, But Connors has predicted that it is only going to get harder for the Australian star to go further up in the rankings, which could be his biggest challenge in the second half of the 2024 season.
Alex de Minaur won the Rosmalen Grass Court Championships, the ATP 250 event. de Minaur defeated the United States’ Sebastian Korda, 6-2, 6-4 in the final. When Brett Connors brought him up in the discussion, this is what Jimmy Connors had to say.
“To jump into the Top 10, that’s no easy task. Now, moving his way up from no. 7 to no. 5 to no. 3, that’s gonna be a little bit of a tougher task. But he’s gonna have to continue working and grinding in the same way that he is right now to make that next step.”
The 1982 Wimbledon champion is interested to see how the youngster would fare in a Grand Slam, which is a different kettle of fish as compared to an ATP 250 or an ATP 500 event.
Brett, too agreed with his legendary father, by talking about how de Minaur’s W-L record in 2024 involved 11 losses against mostly top 10 players only, such as Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Alexander Zverev and Novak Djokovic. The point being that Alex de Minaur is not playing badly by any measure since suffering an upset reduces the confidence of any player. Having made it recently to the French Open quarterfinals, the Australian No.1 is consistently improving.
Interestingly enough, de Minaur’s girlfriend and fellow WTA player Katie Boulter also won a title, the Nottingham Open, alongside Alex de Minaur’s Rosmalen Grass Court Championships win. A few months back too, de Minaur and Boulter had won their respective ATP and WTA titles within a gap of a few hours. While he won the Acapulco Open, she won the San Diego Open then. This ‘twinning’ is also why de Minaur’s win is being discussed a lot in the tennis world.
Beating a player like Sebastian Korda in a final match of a tournament will boost Alex de Minaur’s confidence for sure.
All de Minaur needs to do now, is to have better control of his temperament in important moments of a match. And 8-time Grand Slam winner Jimmy Connors too agrees with this point. Will the Australian carry forward the legacy of the likes of Rod Laver, Pat Cash and Lleyton Hewitt? Time will tell.
