Alexander Zverev defeats Casper Ruud at ATP Finals to improve to 2-0 in round-robin group

Alexander Zverev continued his perfect start to his ATP Finals campaign on Wednesday night, defeating Casper Ruud, 7-6 (3), 6-3, to improve to 2-0 in the John Newcombe round-robin group.

He had beaten Andrey Rublev in his first match, 6-4, 6-4.

Zverev still isn’t assured of qualifying for the semifinals of the year-end event, though. It’s still possible for there to be a three-way tie at 2-1 between him, Ruud and Carlos Alcaraz, which would come down to tie-break procedures between sets and games won.

That scenario would happen if Zverev falls to Alcaraz and Ruud beats Rublev in the group’s last wave of matches on Friday.

There is one thing Zverev clinched with his latest win, though.

The German’s victory over the Norwegian was his 68th win of the year, which is the most wins in a single season for a man since 2017, when Rafael Nadal also accumulated 68 wins.

Jannik Sinner will also go for his 68th win of the year on Thursday as he takes on Daniil Medvedev in his last round-robin match.

Zverev and Ruud put on an absolute serving display on Wednesday night—not only was there only one break in the entire match, there was only one break point in the entire match, too, with Zverev converting that one for a 5-3 lead in the second set before serving out the one-hour, 26-minute victory at love.

Zverev finished the match with almost twice as many winners as unforced errors, 28 to 16, and Ruud was in the positives too, 13 to 10.

“It was a good match—I thought both of us played quite good tennis,” Zverev said afterwards in his on-court interview. “I’m happy with the win. I thought maybe it was still a little bit better than the first match, even though the first match was quite good as well.

“I’m looking forward to Carlos now on Friday, and then hopefully a few more matches on the weekend.”

Awaiting the world No. 2 in his final round-robin match will be the No. 3-ranked Alcaraz, and it’ll be a head-to-head tie-breaker, too—they’ve split their 10 previous career meetings evenly, 5-5.

Zverev leads 4-2 on hard courts, though, and more specifically 2-0 on indoor hard courts, with a 6-3, 6-3 victory in the semifinals of Vienna in 2021 and a 6-7 (3), 6-3, 6-4 victory in the round-robin stage right here at the ATP Finals in Turin a year ago.