Against Kyrgios, Zverev was the player we've been waiting to see

It was hard to know, from one game to the next, what was coming from Nick Kyrgios in his fourth-round match against Alexander Zverev on Tuesday.

He started the night with a 128-m.p.h. second-serve ace, but by the end of the opening game he had been irritated by a noise in the crowd, made two backhand errors, and had his serve broken. For the next 20 minutes, Kyrgios tried to loosen up his back, which had stiffened somewhere along the way. Finally, at 2-5, he asked for the trainer, only to wave him off when he got to the court. From there, Kyrgios suddenly decided to make it a match, and he nearly stole his way back into it.

But while Kyrgios was putting on a predictably unpredictable performance, we knew from the start what we were getting from Zverev. The 20-year-old German played what may have been his best match of the year, driving through his ground strokes with pace and depth, making 77 percent of his first serves in the opening set, and hitting 22 winners against 13 errors.

Match point from Zverev's win over Kyrgios in Miami:

You could see early that Zverev was dialed in; when Kyrgios threw a couple of low slices toward his backhand side—a tough shot for a guy who’s 6’6” and has a two-hander—Zverev went down and got them, and he stayed through the hitting zone, just the way the textbooks teach. This wasn’t the Zverev who is content to sit back and loop balls into the corners; this was the Zverev we’ve been waiting to see in 2018, one who relentlessly looks to create openings and end points.

By 2-2 in the second set, it was obvious that, even with Kyrgios giving his best, his spin-heavy ground strokes weren’t a match for Zverev’s flat bombs. While Kyrgios struggled to put mid-court forehands away, Zverev kept hammering the ball deep. By the middle of that game, Kyrgios was grumbling to himself again, and when Zverev broke, the match was essentially over.

Whatever injury his opponent had, this 6-4, 6-4 win still must have been satisfying for Zverev, who will play another young rival, Borna Coric, on Thursday. Zverev lost early in Indian Wells, and he snuck through his first two matches in Miami. But on Tuesday he was in control. We knew what we were going to get from him, and for one of the first times in 2018, we knew it was going to be good.

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