[vc_empty_space height="5px"]
By Giri Nathan
Jannik Sinner must’ve heard that I was talking smack. Okay, not smack exactly, but it did seem that it was getting crowded at the top, and that Sinner—who’d gone up two sets to none on Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon, who’d had match point on Carlos Alcaraz at the US Open—would have to tighten up his game to keep up. He came into 2023 looking a little more muscular. But in Australia, he fell in five sets to Stefanos Tsitsipas, who’d also expelled him from the previous year’s tournament. With that loss, Sinner slunk to a 1–5 record against Tsitsipas, and, a little more troublingly, a 1–16 record against top-five players over his career. Not an auspicious start for our Parmesan-cheese-sponsored hero, who surely has the chops to insert himself into the top five sooner rather than later.