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Welcome to the Australian Open briefing, where will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.

As week one of 2025 wraps up, it’s time to take stock of the tournament to date. Charlie Eccleshare and Matt Futterman have three key takeaways each from the past seven days in Melbourne, as Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz look ominous, Danielle Collins asks tennis to lighten up and conditions cause contentions among players.

Are Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz going under the radar?

If you feel like you haven’t heard much about Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz at the Australian Open, it’s largely because they’ve been so efficient.

Swiatek has been playing with the kind of controlled aggression that is her calling card when she is at her peak. She’s back to overwhelming opponents and making it feel like they’re in a washing machine; she is hitting her shots with greater spin (2877 RPM compared with the 2024 tournament average of 2184) and she’s once again treating dropped games like a personal insult. She has lost just three in her last two matches, and ‘Iga’s bakery’ is very much open for business again.

After beating Emma Raducanu 6-1, 6-0 on Saturday, Swiatek said that she feels like “the ball is listening to me” — a linguistic flourish to follow the many she’d produced with her racket on the court. With new coach Wim Fissette, it feels as though Swiatek has moved on from the end of last year, when she would struggle as soon as matches started to go against her. Perhaps that will happen again here should things get tight, but the way she’s playing, she is unlikely to find herself in that situation. Her draw has also opened up with the withdrawal of No. 13 seed Anna Kalinskaya and the fall of No. 4 seed Jasmine Paolini to Elina Svitolina.

For Alcaraz, the main focus has been his remodeled serve, complete with an extra 5g of lead in his racket. There’s always been a curiosity about how good this four-time Grand Slam winner could be if he had a great rather than a decent serve, and the tennis world has had a glimpse of what that might look like over this last week. Against Yoshihito Nishioka in the second round, Alcaraz produced 14 aces and won 89 percent of first-serve points in a 6-0, 6-1, 6-4 beatdown. Alcaraz was so pleased with his serving performance that he wrote on a camera lens after his win, “Am I a serve bot?” (Tennis speak for a player who has a huge serve but not a lot else.)

Alcaraz has dropped just one set — which he lost in a sloppy seven-point tiebreak rather than the 12 games that preceded it — and he has lost his serve just twice.

These two great champions ended last year in a bit of a funk; both now look ominously refreshed.

The renaissance of Gael Monfils

It’s been a big week for teenage breakthroughs in the men’s draw, with Learner Tien (19), Joao Fonseca (18) and Jakub Mensik (19) posting landmark wins over top-10 players.

But it’s also been a standout few days for one of the tour’s veterans: the 38-year-old Gael Monfils. Fresh from becoming the oldest man to win an ATP title at the Auckland Open a week ago, Monfils has backed that up with three more match wins to make it to the second week of a major for the first time in three years.

It isn’t as though he’s had an easy run to the last 16. Monfils beat the huge-serving and in-form No. 30 seed Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard in five sets in the first round, and on Saturday took out the world No. 4 Taylor Fritz to reach the fourth round. Beating Fritz was Monfils’ first win over a top-5 player at a major since 2008.

There are few more popular players on the tour than the French showman, and his late-career renaissance has been one of the feel-good tennis stories of the last year or so.

Monfils will play the American No. 21 seed Ben Shelton next, but he’s not one for looking ahead too much. As he said in a news conference after beating Fritz: “I’m surfing with this moment and I’ll see.”

The Australian Open conditions are confusing the players

Have the conditions been fast or slow at the Australian Open this week? Well, it depends on the time of day — and who is being asked.

After a scratchy serving performance against Clara Tauson on Friday that saw her broken four times in the first set alone, the world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka had some thoughts.

“Conditions are pretty heavy for servers,” she said in a news conference. “It’s not giving you that match advantage as usual. Yeah, balls are heavy. Courts are a little bit slower. You just have to sometimes just put that serve in and just play the rally.”

A few hours later, Carlos Alcaraz came into the interview room and said: “I didn’t find it tricky to serve… the ball became a little bit faster with the heat.”

Come the night session, it was all change.

“I mean, it’s not even the same tournament from, like, my first-round match playing on John Cain during the day,” said Jessica Pegula after a straight-sets loss to Olga Danilovic. “It’s fast, and then playing in there at night it’s not even remotely the same.”

Come the next afternoon, Ons Jabeur was incredulous at the idea of the courts being slow.

“They’re faster,” Jabeur said.

“Who said slower? They’re way faster. For me. I don’t know.

“I saw Jess (Pegula) was talking about the conditions. At night it’s always slower anywhere you play in the world. It’s always slower. But the conditions, let’s say daylight is really, really fast.”

The cliche goes that Melbourne can experience four seasons a day, and the temperature has plummeted during some evening sessions, drastically changing the conditions. All of which makes scheduling decisions even more important, and more of a benefit to Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic and other top-tier players who can dictate when they want to play based on their preferences. Alcaraz is a day man, Djokovic night.

A scorching next few days are expected to be followed by a much cooler end to the week. Who will that please the most? Probably whoever’s just won.

A wind of change blows through the men’s draw

Much has been made in tennis the past year about the turning of eras at the very top of the men’s game, from the ‘Big Three’ to the era of Jannik Sinner and Alcaraz and a resistant Djokovic.

Between them lies the sandwich generation, which this week in Melbourne got blown away not by the two players who have spent 2024 reconfiguring the sport they play, but by the generation who grew up on Sinner and Alcaraz and have learned some of their tricks.

It sounds irresponsible to declare the chances that Daniil Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Andrey Rublev and Casper Ruud will win a Grand Slam completely over. But it has certainly looked that way lately and both Medvedev and Tsitsipas — and Ruud and Rublev — did little to dissuade anyone of that storyline this week, not so much because they lost but because of how.

Medvedev seemed unable to hit the ball through the court when he needed to during his five-set defeat to the 19-year-old Tien in the second round. He could still occasionally bang out an ace, but it was more of the aim-and-shoot variety than his old twisting, rhythmic blasts. A version of Medvedev that doesn’t get free points on serve is very far from the big-serving counterpuncher formula that made him such a disruptor to the ‘Big Three.’ Still, he was about 10cm of depth on a volley away from winning the match, playing too safe while up 7-6 in the deciding 10-point tiebreak.

Tsitsipas lost to Alex Michelsen, the American 20-year-old, in straight sets in the first round. He then basically said he’s struggling to feel the hunger for success that he used to feel, that the game no longer feels fresh for him. Perhaps more worrying was the ease with which Michelsen dismantled his backhand, all while showing off the adaptability and all-court comfort that a tennis player bidding to take on the Sinner-Alcaraz era needs.

Alexander Zverev and Fritz — even though the latter lost — are the current exceptions. They know they have to raze the tennis that got them where they are but no further, and are willing to take the hits to do it. Can the rest of their generation do the same?

The soundtrack to the Australian Open and a refreshing vision of tennis

At the Australian Open, tennis is only one of the attractions.

Among the others is a steady flow of musicians, mostly guitarists and singers, playing singer-songwriter tunes and acoustic versions of everything from Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen to Kenny Rogers, John Denver and Oasis. Fans recline on artificial grass and soft surfaces, sipping beer and cocktails all afternoon and evening.

It’s completely awesome. Every tournament should have a music festival as a side attraction. Musical acts on Henman Hill would be amazingly great.

The All England Club might not credential me for even suggesting it, or even thinking about it. It will never happen. Fine. How about everywhere else?

Danielle Collins shaking up the Melbourne crowd was the good side of tennis needle

About half the tennis-following population is going to take issue with this, but the sport is seriously going to miss Danielle Collins, who is probably not too long for the tour as she tries to navigate the complications of trying to start a family while managing endometriosis.

In a staid sport where being outspoken is often looked down upon, Collins never shies away from a chance to speak out. Sometimes, her targets are bewildering and the way she goes after them can feel unnecessarily one-sided. Her apparent ‘beef’ with Swiatek after their Olympic quarterfinal doesn’t make much sense; Swiatek was just as confused about the situation.

But the way she gave it right back to a hostile Aussie crowd after her second-round win over Destanee Aiava, putting her hand to her ear to bring out the howls then gloating over the “big fat paycheck” she had just taken was a thing of beauty.

Just ask expert troller Novak Djokovic.

“I think she handled it really well. I don’t think I would be that polite, and I know exactly the feeling,” he said.

“I think she was funny, smart, and just a big fan of what she did. Big fan.”

Shot of the day

Gael Monfils spent basically all of his match against Taylor Fritz moving him up and down.

Australian Open men’s draw 2025

Australian Open women’s draw 2025

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This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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