After the first match at the Belgrade Open, in which the Croatian tennis player Marin Cilic squared off against the France’s Alexander Miller, Cilic was asked if he could compare the “big three” (Djokovic, Nadal and Federer) with Janiko Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, the young studs of world tennis.
“I hardly played with Sinner. As for Novak and Rafa, they are similar when it comes to the mental part. If you are not 100% focused from the first ball in the match, you might as well go home and say goodbye to everyone. You have to be mentally ready to play against them from the first ball, because once they get into a rhythm, there’s no turning back. With Roger, however, it was quite different. He played athletically, everything happened very quickly, he served fantastically, played offensively, changed the rhythm and the game. If I compare them with the younger ones, Sinner and Alcaraz, they are not yet at that level of mental preparation, like Novak, Roger and Rafa. That has been shown over the years and that’s why they dominated,” Cilic explained.
