Alex de Minaur may never have a better shot at a grand slam title than this September at Flushing Meadows.
Jannik Sinner is out with a knee injury and Carlos Alcaraz looks rusty on the road back from a four-month layoff.
Like at the French Open in May, when Alexander Zverev took advantage of their absence to break through for his maiden major, there is a path to the top in New York for anyone good enough to take it.
De Minaur was furious with himself for not making more of the “once in a blue moon” opportunity in Paris, where he fell to Jakub Mensik in the third round after taking the first set 6-0.
But the Aussie ace is prolific on outdoor hard courts – the surface on which the tennis world will converge in a few days’ time for the US Open, and where he is a three-time quarter-finalist.
He will open his tournament against a qualifier next week and has been drawn to potentially face Zverev in the quarter-finals in New York.
But in a gift from the gods he will avoid Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Daniil Medvedev and big-hitting US hero Ben Shelton who are all on the opposite side of the US Open draw.
Thus the scene has been set for the Demon to make his long-awaited charge.
HAPPIEST ON HARD COURTS
In 2025, de Minaur was the No. 1 player on hard courts, leading the ATP Tour with 43 wins on the surface.
Eight of his 11 career titles have come on an outdoor hard court.
Alcaraz cruelly cut down de Minaur’s Australian Open hopes en route to the title in February, when the two met at the quarter-final stage.
But the swashbuckling Spaniard has looked mortal in his pre-tournament preparations, as he works his way back from a right wrist injury.
And Sinner, who has gatekept de Minaur twice at hard court majors and is 13-0 against the Aussie all-time, will not feature at all in New York.
Now is the time to make a run. So what is the catch?
His serve.
Last year, de Minaur’s run at Flushing Meadows ended in the quarters, falling in four sets to Felix Auger-Aliassime – who then hit the Sinner roadblock in the semis.
De Minaur won the first set before losing three subsequent tiebreakers, serving up a disappointing 11 double faults and a first-serve percentage barely above 40 per cent.
He was brutally honest in his self-assessment.
“I think the biggest thing for me is my serve. My serve has been letting me down in big matches,” he told reporters after the match.
“It’s pretty tough to win a high quality match, serving the way I did today.
“It’s something that needs to improve, because if not, I’m going to put myself into a lot of trouble frequently against the top players in the later stages of these tournaments.”
Twelve months on, has the Demon conquered his serving demons? Or is there more to it?
THE MENTAL MATH
From a raw numbers perspective, de Minaur’s serve on a rolling 52-week run has not changed much from 2025, acknowledging that there is some overlap between the two data points.
Since the start of the US Open last year his first serve percentage on hard courts sits at 59.3 per cent, up from 56.2 per cent in 2025.
However his first serve win percentage of 72.2 per cent is slightly down on last year, which sat at 73.5 per cent.
His ace and double fault rate are almost identical.
So week-to-week not much has changed – and his total serve rating still has him inside the top 50 players on the ATP Tour.
The issue, as de Minaur himself highlighted, is when the fundamentals fall away as the pressure mounts.
Against Auger-Aliassime it was the serve; in February against Alcaraz, he tried to match the Spaniard’s blistering ground strokes and it took him “out of my comfort zone and at times out of my skin”.
In Paris he couldn’t put his finger on why, other than to say he was not himself.
Brutally honest has become a default mode of de Minaur’s in his recent grand slam exits.
His raw self-critique following the US, Australian and French Open defeats were rare to see from a player ranked No. 7 in the world.
Asked about his mentality behind letting the emotion out after those losses, de Minaur said it helped keep himself honest about not settling for good enough.
“It’s just with any athlete, you put a lot of pressure on yourself because you want to achieve certain things, you want to keep breaking new ground,” he said at the Washington Open this month.
“One of the hardest things in sport is, as you get higher and higher, to constantly break new ground. It gets more difficult. So you feel like you’re almost running up against a wall.
“It’s (about) finding different ways or tricking your own mind to believe that there is still more to achieve, and that is what I feel like. If I didn’t feel like that, I probably wouldn’t get frustrated at certain results.
“I feel like I’ve still got more to give. I’m excited for what is to come.”
De Minaur will feel he has more to give in New York next month.
REFRESHED AND REFOCUSED
The Aussie star took a four-week break from the tour in June-July, which included a secret English wedding to longtime partner and fellow tennis star Katie Boulter, followed by a getaway in Tuscany.
His first tournament back was in Washington, perhaps earlier than some expected, in part to defend his ATP 500 title from the year prior but mostly to get the reps in ahead of the US Open.
He said it was a much-needed break in the season before focusing his full attention on the final major of the year.
“I think it’s been a great little kind of stop in the middle of the season where I’ve been able to take a step back and refresh and get a lot of energy to hopefully finish the year strong,” he said in Washington.
“Over the last couple of years I have definitely noticed that this part of the year, from clay, going onto the grass and finishing at Wimbledon, I found it very important for me to take some time off to make sure that I can get back on the horse and finish the year strong.”
De Minaur says the scathing self-critique is part of his growth process.
When the whips are cracking deep in the tournament, we will see just how much he has grown since that frustrating defeat on Arthur Ashe a year ago.
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