Laver Cup: US Open champion Alexander Zverev clinches it for Team Europe a day after letting a match point slip

The Laver Cup ended the way it so often has for Team Europe, with Alexander Zverev on court and the last point on his racquet. What makes this one worth more than the result is what happened to him the day before, and how little of it he carried into the match that decided everything.

Most of the coverage has written it up as the German closer doing his job again. That is true, and it skips the part that matters. Zverev came to London as the winningest player of the season, a Grand Slam champion twice over this year, and yet the event he used to own had stopped giving him singles wins. Then, with a match point in hand against Alex de Minaur, he watched it disappear.

That defeat is the hinge. According to the Laver Cup’s own match report, Zverev took the first set 6-2 dominating from the baseline, before de Minaur turned the match by coming forward and forcing errors. The Australian took the second-set tiebreak 7-5, saved a match point at 9-8 in the deciding match tiebreak and converted his own to win it 11-9, putting Team World ahead 5-3. Sky Sports went further and wrote that Zverev let slip multiple match points; the event’s report counts one. Either way, de Minaur admitted he had been “in a fair bit of strife, and it was looking quite bleak.”

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For most of his career, that was the Zverev script: the lead built, the finish missed. Its most famous page is the 2020 US Open final, which he lost to Dominic Thiem after leading by two sets to love. This year tore it up. He won his first major at Roland Garros in June, reached the Wimbledon final, and then beat Ben Shelton 6-3, 7-6(2), 5-7, 6-2 to win the US Open, only the second German man to do it after Boris Becker. The ATP Tour counts him as the 12th player since 1978 to reach Grand Slam finals on clay, grass and hard courts in a single season. “In Paris I was full of stress, now I’m full of happiness,” he said in New York, as quoted by deutschland.de.

Sunday asked whether that change reaches past the big stages. Learner Tien, the American making his Team World debut, had already beaten Flavio Cobolli in a match tiebreak earlier in the weekend, and his long rallies and shotmaking frustrated Zverev, The Big Lead reported. At 5-5 in the first set Tien saved three consecutive break points. At 5-6 Zverev faced a set point on his own serve. He saved it, won the tiebreak 7-3 and needed only one break in the second set to finish 7-6(3), 6-3 in an hour and 49 minutes.

That set point is the moment of the weekend. A day after the finish deserted him, he stood at the line one point from losing a set he had controlled, and this time the finish held. It is the trait the whole season has been built on: the refusal to let the last miss decide the next point.

The win put Team Europe out of reach at 13-5 at The O2, after Cobolli and Jakub Mensik had beaten de Minaur and Taylor Fritz 7-5, 6-3 in the day’s doubles. It was the fourth time Zverev has clinched the Laver Cup, after Chicago in 2018, Geneva in 2019 and Boston in 2021, and the event now lists him as its all-time leading scorer with 26 points across seven editions. Europe has won six of the nine editions played. For captain Yannick Noah it was a first title, a year after losing to Andre Agassi’s Team World in San Francisco.

Zverev himself kept it simple. “I haven’t won a match here in two years, so I’m happy that I did it today,” he said, per the ATP Tour. “Massive credit to the entire Team World. They pushed us all the way again.” He told Sky Sports that Europe “had three chances to close it out in the singles” and added, “I think Carlos is also very happy that I closed it out,” a nod to teammate Carlos Alcaraz. Noah thanked his players and joked that “for once, you won for me.”

The numbers behind the week point the same way. The Laver Cup’s report has Zverev leading the ATP Tour with 56 match wins this season at world No. 2, and The Big Lead sees the top ranking within reach. For years the question about him was whether he could finish. In London he answered it twice in one weekend: once badly, once for good, with the second answer coming less than a day after the first.

Tags: Gillian Anderson, Carlos Alcaraz, Ben Shelton, Dua Lipa, Alexander Zverev, Alex de Minaur

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