Ben Shelton’s run to the Roland Garros fourth round has been a strange one, but he will not care how he grinds out wins.
The fact of the matter is he has a great chance of reaching the quarter-finals and causing a great upset against Carlos Alcaraz.
What will aid his cause is the lack of time spent on court, having seen his second-round opponent, Hugo Gaston, pull out with injury.
The Spaniard, meanwhile, continues to have his matches elongated against far lesser opponents, dropping sets to both Fábián Marozsán and Damir Džumhur now.
Jim Courier admitted he worried for Alcaraz with his unpredictable play style, but Ben Shelton will want to use this as fuel for a potential upset.
Ben Shelton not happy with his French Open practice sessions
Chatting with the press after his third-round win over Gigante, Shelton revealed the struggles of facing a fellow left-handed player and how that has affected his practice.
However, that’s not all that’s been bothering him, as he revealed an area of his game that’s been consistently lacking on the practice courts.
First focusing on his opponent, the 23-year-old noted: ‘The spin off the ball is weird. I returned really well today but returning a lefty serve as a lefty is tough, when you have a guy who can go both ways with the serve and hit the kicker to the backhand. That is the only time in the world that I wish I was righty.
‘When you have a fat kicker and hit it to the righty’s backhand, you can use that every single match and over 90% of the players are righty. You can just go to that play over and over again if you have a great kicker.
‘For me, I hit the kicker out wide and I hit it perfectly and it works, but if I don’t hit it perfectly and Sinner or Foe or Carlos or anybody is kind of just destroying a forehand winner on that.
‘There is a lot of small intricacies of the game that make it more difficult to play when you are a lefty. My last couple of days, warming up and practising with lefties, the way they are hitting their spinny forehands with side spin I can’t make a volley. I was pretty horrendous in practice. I was happy with how I volleyed today because the last couple of days in practice were a shocker.’
Ben Shelton’s clay-court results have been unpredictable
It has been a really strange clay-court season for Shelton, who is already enjoying his best-ever run at the French Open in his third appearance at the event.
However, he faces a brand-new challenge on the Parisian dirt: dethroning the reigning champion.
Looking back across his results on this surface this year does little to build a case for a shock victory though, with little consistency as he jumped from great highs to shock lows.
A first-round exit in Monte-Carlo marked worrying signs to kickstart this portion of the campaign, yet he bounced straight back in Munich to reach the final, coming unstuck against Alexander Zverev.
Likely hoping to kick on from there, Shelton could only follow it up with another early exit in Madrid before being brushed aside in the first round of Rome too by Jaume Munar.
Clay has never been his favoured surface, but some of the tennis he’s been playing in Paris has been impressive. However, he will have to reach brand-new heights to trouble Alcaraz, channelling his performances in Munich whilst elevating even those levels.
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