Alexander Zverev advances to French Open final, on verge of shedding his Grand Slam demons
The best player to never win a Grand Slam is a win away from never having to be called that again.
In a Roland-Garros defined by upsets up and down the draw, world No. 3 Alexander Zverev advanced to the final with a 7-5, 6-2, 3-6, 6-3 win over No. 26 seed Jakub Mensik on Friday. He will face the winner of the later semifinal between Matteo Arnaldi and Flavio Cobolli in the final on Sunday.
It will be Zverev's fourth career Grand Slam final. Obviously, the first three didn't go so well.
He completely collapsed against Dominic Thiem in the COVID-addled 2020 US Open.He took a 2-1 set lead over Carlos Alcaraz in the 2024 Roland-Garros before getting crushed in the final two sets. He got bulldozed by Jannik Sinner in the 2025 Australian Open.
All three of those opponents were top 5 players. Zverev has not had to face a single opponent with that degree of difficulty in this tournament, and won't have to in the final, either. He is the lone elite player left, after shocking upsets at the expense of Sinnerand Novak Djokovic and injuries to the likes of Carlos Alcaraz and several other young talents.
Mensik could have been a challenge. At 6-foot-5, he's one of the best servers on tour and brings a strong enough baseline game to the table to have won the 2025 Miami Open in the past. It was his first career Grand Slam semifinal, though, and that really showed as the match went on.
Alexander Zverev was the more consistent player in Roland-Garros semifinal
Both men are huge servers, but Mensik's most important shot was inconsistent on a windy day in Paris. He's just not built to win against top opponents when that's happening, especially when he's also regularly making unforced errors in winnable points.
Mensik got only 60% of his high-speed first serve in (with more misses early), and won only 49% of his second-serve points.
The players were on serve in the first set until a pair of Mensik double faults gifted Zverev a break, leaving him on his back foot through the end of the second set.
The match was interrupted in the third set when Mensik, who has struggled with the conditions at Roland-Garros this tournament, needed to take a medical timeout. He seemed to return renewed and soon picked up a break on his way to a third set win.
Zverev immediately picked up a break in the fourth set, though, and didn't grant his opponent any more ground. He was the player who took better advantage of his opportunities throughout the match, winning 4-of-7 break points compared to Mensik's 1-of-4, not to mention a favorable discrepancy in winners and forced errors.
Can Alexander Zverev really do this?
Since the third round or so, it has been evident that anything other than a Zverev title would have been a surprise. It certainly wasn't fait accompli, as the German's mental game has failed him before in the face of big opportunities. He's the third-ranked player in the world, but hasn't won a tournament since Munich in April 2025.
Now he's guaranteed to face a lower-ranked Italian in the final, not the Italian he's dropped nine straight matches against (Sinner). He will be heavily favored. He will be heavily scrutinized, as he's hardly the most popular player on tour due to domestic abuse allegations from two women (which he denies) and an array of on-court incidents. He will be the player to watch, and we won't know until Sunday whether that's a good thing.
What might be already fair to say is that he probably won't have a more straightforward opportunity for a Grand Slam for the rest of his career. At 29 years old, with most of the other tennis elite in their early 20s, that can't be wasted.
