Defending champion plays his best match of the tournament to outclass Paul
©Corinne Dubreuil / FFT(2) Carlos Alcaraz bt (12) Tommy Paul 6-0, 6-1, 6-4
Carlos Alcaraz didn’t set a new personal best at Roland-Garros on Tuesday, but boy, did he come close. The No.2 seed and defending champion rolled past American Tommy Paul 6-0, 6-1, 6-4 to extend his winning streak at the tournament to 11 matches, and reach his third straight semifinal in Paris.
Sprinting out of the gates, Alcaraz scored his 17th career 6-0 set at tour level, and wrapped up victory in a crisp one hour and 34 minutes — a performance that International Tennis Hall of Famer Mats Wilander dubbed as “the perfect tennis match” when interviewing Alcaraz on court afterwards.
“I could close my eyes and everything went in,” Alcaraz said in reply. “My feeling today was unbelievable. I was trying to hit every shot at my 100 per cent… not thinking about anything else, and today was one of those matches where everything went in. I’m just pleased with everything.”
Here’s what we learned from Alcaraz’s clinical showing, which was nearly his most lopsided victory at a major to date.
Paul has been something of a thorn in Alcaraz’s side in recent years, since they first played in 2022 (a match at the ATP Masters 1000 event in Canada that Paul won). Alcaraz came into the match with a 4-2 head-to-head lead against the American — though Paul won a set in two of those defeats to the 22-year-old, and pushed the Spaniard to a second-set tiebreak when they played at last year’s Olympics in Paris.
It was that history, Alcaraz said, that locked him in from the first ball. But even he may not have predicted just how much in the zone he’d be: he hit 40 winners (to just 13 for Paul), won one-third of his games to love, and dropped just five points on serve in the entire match.
“I played against Tommy many times, and every match was really difficult,” he said. “He beat me twice, so that helped me at the beginning of the match to focus on my tennis… trying not to go down or let him get into the match.”
Alcaraz won five straight games to win the second set, but Paul — who struggled with an abdominal injury earlier in the tournament — fended off a similar Alcaraz run with a game performance in the third. He saved five break points in the first game, and the set went with serve until Alcaraz found another burst to win the last three games.
Alcaraz is the first reigning Roland-Garros men’s champion to reach the semifinals the following year since his compatriot Rafael Nadal in 2021 — and he did it in the quickest match the men’s singles draw has seen at this stage or later since David Ferrer thumped Tommy Robredo in the same round in 2013.
“I always say that this tournament is so special to me,” Alcaraz said. “Every time I come here, every year, it feels special. Before the tournament begins, I always think that I really want to go far in this tournament, to feel the energy from the people match after match.
“I’m really happy to be in the semifinals again, third time in a row, so I’m just trying to enjoy this moment and hopefully keep it going.”
Alcaraz is now 32-2 on the terre battue in the last year, a run that began with his first Roland-Garros title. Twenty of those wins have come this year — a watershed mark on tour — and two of those were against his semifinal opponent, Lorenzo Musetti.
Alcaraz beat the Italian in the Monte Carlo final and the Rome semifinals, and will bid for the fifth major final of his career when he faces Musetti on Friday.
Alcaraz hopes to become just the third man this century to successfully defend his Roland-Garros title, alongside Rafael Nadal, who did it 10 times, and Gustavo Kuerten (2001).
ROLAND-GARROS
19 May - 8 June 2025
