Jannik Sinner arrives in Miami Open final on a mission, ready to say the quiet part out loud – The Athletic
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Jannik Sinner is on a mission.
Anyone could see that Friday night, during his Miami Open semifinal against Alexander Zverev.
Zverev, who will return to world No. 3 Monday when the rankings come out, was playing about as well as he possibly could. He bombed 130mph second serves. He stepped into the court and cracked forehands and backhands that pushed Sinner back. He came to the net and stabbed volleys for winners.
All of this is part of the aggressiveness he is adding to his game, after losing too many big matches in part because of passive play.
Sinner was getting beaten at the baseline. So he did what he has done all year: He relied on an increasingly precise, increasingly devastating serve and smacked 15 aces to stay in touch.
And then, on the key point in the second set’s tiebreak, with Zverev on the verge of pushing him into a wearying third set, Sinner lofted up a lob off a meek forehand approach shot. The German lost the ball in the floodlights, and when his overhead patted into the net, Sinner had a mini-break.
Two points later, that was that, as Sinner completed a 6-3, 7-6(4) win to move one match from completing the Sunshine Double of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., and this event without losing a set. No man has ever done that.
Sinner has both rolled and grappled this past week.
In the quarterfinals, he pummelled Frances Tiafoe 6-2, 6-2. One match earlier, he twice arm-wrestled Alex Michelsen out of an advantage. First when the American served for the second set at 5-3, and then when he surged to a big lead in another second-set tiebreak.
“I think he’s playing better than last year,” Sinner’s coach, Simone Vagnozzi, said after his charge destroyed Tiafoe. “The serve. The volley.”
Why now, when the meat of the season is still pretty far off? What’s the mission?
Sinner doesn’t like to say it out loud, but he wants to be No. 1 again, sooner rather than later. He also knows the time to make his move on Carlos Alcaraz is now, for reasons that are unique to his past 12 months.
“The ranking is a consequence of how someone plays, right?,” he said in a news conference Friday after surviving Zverev, before making his immediate goal clear. “I know the opportunities, I know where I’m standing.”
Then Sinner gave lip service to the broader goals, to prioritizing quality rather than simply results. He wants to play great tennis at the biggest events. Do that, and the ranking will follow. Still, he has done the math.
“Obviously, I know the scenarios, I’m very aware,” he said. “But, you know, everything can change with one event. That’s how tennis is.”
Sinner could have been forgiven had he taken his foot off the gas in Miami.
He’d already won Indian Wells two weeks ago. It’s a long season. Back-to-back ATP Masters 1000 tournaments, the highest level of tennis other than the four Grand Slams, is a lot, especially with so much coming up in the next five months: the clay-court swing. A chance to complete the career Grand Slam at the French Open. A title defense at Wimbledon.
Winning the Sunshine Double is a nice thing to accomplish, especially while setting a record for consecutive sets won (34 if he beats world No. 22 Jiří Lehečka in straights Sunday) at Masters 1000 level. But it’s not exactly a career-maker, and Sinner is fully aware of that, too.
“Some stats, they are just not relevant. Winning sets doesn’t mean anything, you need to win the match,” he said after beating Tiafoe.
Exerting all that effort to win 12 hard-court matches in just shy of a month could spell short-term gain for long-term pain. Going a little less than full-gas wouldn’t be the worst idea, but Sinner has done nothing of the sort in his pursuit of the world ranking he held between February 2024 and September last year.
It’s fun to be the world No. 1, even if Alcaraz is getting a little tired of players going for broke against him and turning into, in his words, “Roger Federer,” because they have nothing to lose.
“It’s a bit annoying,” Alcaraz said in his news conference after a third-round loss here to Sebastian Korda, who played the match of his career against him and then lost to a qualifier, Martin Landaluce, in the next match while battling a balky back. “You have to accept it. You have to keep it going and try your best.
“I feel luckily I have a lot of weapons, I have a lot of things that I can do on the court trying to get him uncomfortable, which today, to be honest, I couldn’t find that way. But I know from now on, I know they are going to play like that. I just got to be ready.”
Sinner is ready.
Ask Vagnozzi and his other coach, Darren Cahill, and they will dispense this advice: Do not let the even temper and calm demeanor fool you. Sinner burns hot. His serving in 2026 has been frightening. Even in matches like the one against Zverev, when his baseline game is not quite there, he will find a line on a first delivery when he needs one.
He’s burning especially hot right now because what has happened this March, and what unfolds during the next five weeks, may go a long way toward determining whether he can get back to the top of the mountain sooner rather than later.
When it comes to the rankings, which are determined by the points they earn for each win, there are two calculations players really care about.
The first is the overall ranking, which is based on their performance over the past 52 weeks. Each week, points won in the same week the previous year are replaced by those accrued in the current one.
The second is the so-called Race to Turin, the Italian city that is the venue for the season-ending ATP Tour Finals. That measures how players have performed in the calendar year, and the top eight players qualify for that lucrative event, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake in every match.
The first calculation is the one on Sinner’s front burner.
Every time players compete in tournaments, they are playing not just against their opponents, but against the previous year’s version of themselves. But from now until the end of April, Sinner is playing against a ghost.
He missed February, March and April last year under a three-month doping suspension for a positive test for clostebol, an anabolic steroid. Sinner twice tested positive at the 2024 BNP Paribas Open, but a tribunal convened by tennis’ anti-doping authority found him to bear “no fault or negligence” and cleared him to play on because it agreed that the fault lay with members of his support team: one brought a healing cream containing clostebol to that tournament; another used it on a cut finger before the latter gave Sinner a massage and, in doing so, contaminated him, the tribunal found.
But the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed to the Court of Arbitration of Sport, because strict liability rules mean that athletes are responsible for what is in their body, however it gets there. In February 2025, just after Sinner won the Australian Open for a second time, he and WADA reached a settlement with a three-month suspension attached. A ruling from CAS could have come with a penalty of 12 to 24 months.
Last year’s absence brings opportunity in this one. With zero points to defend until late April, everything between the Australian Open and its Italian equivalent is a bonus. So far, Sinner is cashing in.
Still, when Alcaraz lifted the Australian Open trophy, playing sublime tennis to move 3,000 points ahead of Sinner, thinking about catching him seemed a little absurd. Sinner had lost to a redlining Novak Djokovic in the semifinals, spurning numerous break-point chances down the stretch of a five-set classic.
He appeared angry and practically embarrassed when it was over. Because he was defending champion, he left Melbourne with 1,200 points fewer than when he arrived.
Then the zero period started.
He and Alcaraz both played February’s Qatar Open. Alcaraz won it, and Sinner lost in the quarterfinals, but he got closer to the Spaniard because the latter played just one event that month, compared to two in 2025.
Then came Indian Wells. With nowhere to go but up, Sinner plowed through the competition and prevailed over a hot Daniil Medvedev in two tiebreaks to take the title.
Jannik Sinner is one match away from becoming the first man to win the Sunshine Double without dropping a set. (Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
Alcaraz had lost to Medvedev in the semifinals, the same round he was beaten by Jack Draper there in 2025. His point total didn’t budge, while Sinner’s went up 1,000 points.
Off they went to Miami, where Alcaraz did a little better than last year, when he lost his opening match. This year, he lost his second match.
Early-round wins don’t count for much, though. He gained just 40 points.
With his semifinal win over Zverev Friday night, Sinner put himself in position to collect another 1,000 points. He will be a heavy favorite later today against Lehečka of the Czech Republic, who will be playing in his first Masters 1000 final.
With a win, Sinner will have collected 2,000 points from two tournaments in three-and-a-half weeks — the same amount that Alcaraz received for winning the Australian Open — and the gap between them will have dropped to 1,190 points as the clay-court season begins Monday.
They have yet to face each other this season, but (barring injury) are almost certain to eventually.
Last year, they met in three of the four Grand Slam finals and on three other occasions, including to decide the champion of the season-ending ATP Tour Finals.
Surely another Alcaraz-Sinner showdown is looming. Or maybe it’s already underway.
