Team Europe was in a very good mood after winning the 2024 Laver Cup, as Alexander Zverev revealed that Carlos Alcaraz was the architect of Team Europe’s comeback on the final day.
Before the third and final day of the 2024 Laver Cup in Europe, Team Europe was down 4-8 against Team World. It made their situation quite challenging because they needed to win three of the four matches to win the event.
The first match was a doubles match, followed by three singles matches. Team Europe wasn’t in the best spot after the second day. There wasn’t much confidence that they could pull it off, even though, on paper, they had the better roster.
After the event, it was revealed that Alcaraz was the player who technically orchestrated the comeback. During the press conference, players were asked how the decision about who would play came up, and Zverev explained that they had a meeting the night before, and Alcaraz went into the room and broke down what would happen.
“What was the thinking? Well, it was quite simple. We had a meeting last night. It was extremely simple. We had an extremely simple meeting. Carlos walked in. He decided, ‘I want to play doubles with Casper. Then Daniil is gonna play singles against Shelton.'”
Before Zverev was able to finish his thoughts, Alcaraz quickly interjected, jokingly saying that he wasn’t so strict in his decisionmaking, while Zverev continued explaining how the meeting went.
“Wasn’t me, right?”
The German player admitted that Alcaraz’s confidence in him had a profound effect on him because he had never had that type of confidence in himself.
“Daniil is gonna play singles against Shelton. You are not going to lose to Tiafoe, which he had so much confidence in me, I never had in my life within myself, ever. And I’m gonna win the deciding match. And, well…”
Before he even finished that thought, Daniil Medvedev interrupted him, pointing out how everybody seemed to agree that in this thought process, seemingly everyone agreed that the Russian would lose his match against Ben Shelton.
“So you knew I’m gonna lose, right? (Laughter.)”
Zverev simply deflected that by once again praising Alcaraz for breaking down what would happen, which ultimately did happen.
“No, honestly we had, like, a half-an-hour meeting, and Carlos walked in and decided what we are gonna do and we went to do that.”
It’s almost like he spoke it into existence because everything happened exactly like that. Alcaraz played doubles with Ruud, and they won. Medvedev faced Shelton and ended up losing the match in three sets. Zverev then had a miraculous fightback against Frances Tiafoe, with Alcaraz sealing Team Europe’s win by beating Taylor Fritz comfortably in the final match.
It was a fascinating anecdote from this year’s Laver Cup, which ended up being one of the most exciting editions, certainly in recent years, after Team World’s comfortable wins in the previous two years.
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