The demon has a gorilla the size of Sinner on its back. Here’s how to rock it

Solving the Jannik Sinner puzzle is far from just Alex de Minaur’s problem.

Aside from Carlos Alcaraz, Sinner has routinely beaten everyone else recently, including winning 131 games and losing just 12 over the last two years. Alcaraz was responsible for seven of those defeats.

However, de Minaur’s 0-13 head-to-head record against Sinner has been a gorilla on his back during his impressive rise to the top 10 and as he increasingly heads into the latter stages of Grand Slams.

It was Sinner who brutally ended the local hero’s career-best Australian Open run to the quarterfinals last year. De Minaur was honest after winning just six games against dual champions Melbourne Park: “It’s probably my worst game.”

On the plus side, de Minaur will not face Sinner for the 14th time unless they both progress to this year’s final, a scenario the Aussies are desperate to avoid as it has been 50 years since Mark Edmondson’s 1976 triumph.

ATP coach and analyst Craig O’Shannessy believes the only way de Minaur can turn things around against Sinner is to make himself uncomfortable – and urged the world number six to use Alcaraz’s US Open final strategy against the Italian as her blueprint.

“What you’re trying to do against Sinner is not give him the ball he wants and not give him the same ball over and over again,” O’Shannessy told this masthead.

“The whole key in the US Open final was variety – a lot of sliced ​​backhands, but hit in a way where the ball spin was more than normal and the ball speed was less than normal. By the time the ball gets to the other side, it’s very slow and doesn’t give Sinner anything to return.”

“Another thing we saw [Alcaraz do] he was hitting high-rolling forehands – three or four racket lengths over the net – to get the ball out of his hitting zone and again giving him nothing to step on.”

We delved into the de Minaur-Sinner matches to uncover themes and see how the Australian’s tactics developed, with the help of advanced statistics from Tennis Australia, the ATP Tour and Tennis Abstract’s game analysis team.

Blunting the demon’s power

De Minaur’s combined performance in several metrics ranks him as the sixth-best returner on the ATP Tour over the past year, but he was No. 1 before that.

The 26-year-old has remarkable hand-eye coordination and reflexes that allow him to stand near or inside the baseline, return serves and then rush his opponents.

Sinner is now atop the return charts, but also #1 in serve and pressure situations, which explains why de Minaur (and pretty much everyone else) has so much trouble with him. He is as accomplished a player as anyone not named Novak Djokovic.

According to career statistics, only Lleyton Hewitt among Australian men can claim to be a better returner than de Minaur.

Former world number one de Minaur shut out first serve points won (32.1 percent to 31.7), second serve points won (53.7 to 52.7), break points converted (43.2 to 42.6) and return games won (29.9 to 27).

But Sinner’s considerable improvement on his serve – long heralded as a key part of his rise to four-time Grand Slam champion – will hold up against de Minaur’s elite returning skills.

The Italian’s serve numbers in matches against de Minaur are only slightly lower compared to his performance last year against everyone, including first serve points won (78.1 percent to 79.4), second serve points won (54.3 to 59.1) and possession percentage (90.8 to 92).

De Minaur has shown a willingness to change his return position during their clashes in the last two years.

In their showdown in Beijing in September, the Aussie stopped on the baseline and returned Sinner’s second serve, with the world number two winning just 45.7 per cent of those points.

Attacking the demon serves

Where de Minaur struggles the most against Sinner is holding serve.

It’s the part of de Minaur’s arsenal that attracts the most opinion and criticism, with Australian greats Pat Cash, Todd Woodbridge and Mark Philippoussis among those who have their say.

Against Sinner, they hold just 61.5 percent of the time, compared to 84.5 percent against the tour over the past 52 weeks. Sinner also has a knack for breaking de Minaur early in sets, as he did in last year’s Australian Open match, making it difficult for the Aussie to pressure the other side.

That number was just 56 percent in the aforementioned Beijing clash, even in a mid-set clutch, while Sinner hit 82 percent — and didn’t dip below 74 in any of the four games in 2025.

De Minaur has sacrificed a higher first serve percentage in the past few years, looking for more power and cheap points, but is among the least accurate servers and below the tour average for unreturned serves. He was in the same 98th place at Wimbledon last year.

Why rally length matters

Sinner is a master at early terminations, a skill that comes into play when playing Minaura.

This is at least partly due to the fact that he hits about 10 km/h harder than de Minaur on both wings, but the spin advantage is even greater: the difference is about 1,200 rpm between their forehands and about 900 on their backhands.

The sweep of their last three games tells the story: Sinner won 202 of 345 points (59 percent) in innings lasting less than nine shots, but was only 42-40 when turnovers went beyond that.

That says a lot about how good de Minaur is, but the problem is that the shorter points win tennis matches because there are so many more of them.

That fact was reflected in their Beijing encounter, where Sinner won 68/113 rallies lasting four shots or less. De Minaur claimed 16/30 of the five-on-eight rally and shared even longer (15/30) – but they were almost twice as many as the rest.

What de Minaur tried

The Australian grabbed a set off Sinner for only the second time in the Beijing semi-final at the end of September, after which the Italian said it was “a different match than usual against him”.

Sinner beat de Minaur 6-3, 4-6, 6-2, but afterwards acknowledged that it was an even match and his rival created more chances in the second set.

The data reveals that de Minaur used his backhand slice more often – 28 percent of the time, at least four percent more than in any of their other matches – to try to disrupt Sinner’s rhythm and keep him off balance.

In comparison, de Minaur used his backhand slice only 16 percent of the time in all matches over the past year, and the tournament average is 19, so it was an obvious tactic against Sinner. It was also successful for Alcaraz in the US Open final that O’Shannessy was talking about.

De Minaur typically fired both ways with his first serve and won 68 percent of them in the second set, winning 65 percent of those points, more than his average of 61.9 against Sinner.

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Another key tactical approach that paid off especially in the second set was to step well into the baseline and get Sinner’s second serve. The Italian won just four of his 14 second-serve points in that set.

It’s also worth noting that in only one of de Minaur’s last six face-offs with Sinner on hard court — in Toronto — has he fallen below his ATP Performance Rating, which combines “attack,” “conversion,” “steal” and “shot quality” data into one metric.

This tells us that de Minaur is playing at a high level against Sinner. The problem is, he’s going up against a player who must go down as the greatest player of all time.

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