Carlos Alcaraz on his round-two rout: “I played great, to be honest”

NEW YORK—It only took two games for the first sign of trouble to appear.

Mattia Bellucci was serving at 0-1, 15-40 versus Carlos Alcaraz. That the 65th-ranked player in the world would go down an immediate break against a five-time Grand Slam champ was hardly a shock, or a disaster in a best-of-five-set match. This was the first time the 24-year-old Italian had played under the bright lights in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Alcaraz, of course, knows that super-charged atmosphere well. You might say he embodies it.

So it wasn’t the fact that Bellucci ended up losing his serve in the second game of the match that seemed so ominous, it was the way he lost it. At 15-40, he fired a serve and followed it with a forehand winner. One break point down. At 30-40, he fired another serve, drew a short reply from Alcaraz, and moved in for the kill. It looked for a split second that he would get himself out of the jam, and get on the board early—always a plus for an Ashe rookie.

But instead of knocking off that short forehand at the peak of its bounce, Bellucci waited for the ball to come down a bit. And then, possibly because he wanted to see which way Alcaraz was going, he waited some more. When Bellucci finally swung, he could no longer pound it straight down. He had to use topspin to get it over the net and back down in the court. He didn’t use enough, the ball went long, and he was broken.

Sorry, I gotta do my job. Carlos Alcaraz, to the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd

Bellucci was clearly tight and hesitant. Typically, a player in his position will lose the first set quickly, and then loosen up somewhere in the second, once he gets a couple holds under his belt. Bellucci did the first thing—he lost the opening set 6-1. But he never loosened up in the second, and lost it 6-0.

Playing on Ashe at night is one thing. Doing it against an in-form and not-nervous Alcaraz, who has been spotted an early lead, is another, much worse proposition. An opponent of his can normally count on him dropping his level, donating you a few wild errors, and maybe helping you to a break of serve. But that wasn’t the Alcaraz we saw on Wednesday. He was clean and in command. He won 86 percent of his first-serve points, had 17 break points on Bellucci’s serve, was 14 of 18 at net, and hit 32 winners while holding his opponent to 11.

“I played great, to be honest, from the beginning until the last ball,” Alcaraz said after his 6-1, 6-0, 6-3 win. “I tried to make the most of his mistakes, getting a good good rhythm.”

That said, the most important stat of the night was Bellucci’s winner-to-error ratio: He hit 11 of the former, and made 35 of the latter. Even in the third set, when he had finally relaxed and Alcaraz had lost a little focus, Bellucci couldn’t keep the ball in long enough to create any scoreboard pressure.

“I know Mattia’s level, and today wasn’t his day,” Alcaraz said, while apologizing to the crowd for not making the match last longer.

“Sorry, I gotta do my job.”

When I saw the draw, I won’t say I circled this match, but I did think it would be interesting and potentially entertaining for a night crowd. When he’s feeling good, Bellucci has a wide repertoire of shots and superb touch. His run to the semis in Rotterdam earlier this year, where he beat Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas, was memorable. He killed them with his jumping backhand drop shot.

But I can only remember Bellucci daring to hit that shot once against Alcaraz on Wednesday. It won him the point with a brilliantly angled short backhand, but it was a one-off, a glimpse of what could have been. Bellucci lost to Alcaraz, but he lost first to Ashe.

As for the winner, he moves on to the third round, and a date with another, higher-ranked Italian, Luciano Darderi.