BREAKING: Andy Murray and Carlos Alcaraz in agreement as Serena Williams puts pair in their place
Carlos Alcaraz agrees with Andy Murray on just how nerve-wracking it is to team up with Serena Williams as a doubles pairing. Williams made her return to the US Open on Tuesday when she partnered with Alcaraz in the mixed doubles competition.
The pair started off strong after making relatively light work of Erin Routliffe and Lloyd Glasspool in the first round. However, they bowed out in their quarter-final showdown with No. 4 seeds Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli later on Tuesday night. Alcaraz, 23, recently returned to competition after almost five months out of action due to a wrist issue. And it didn’t take 44-year-old veteran Williams long to impose her presence on the Grand Slam hopeful once they got to work.
I think everybody could see, I double-faulted on the first point!” he said while discussing his early nerves at Arthur Ashe Stadium. “I was really, really nervous playing alongside Serena.
“It’s still competition, full crowd, I was out almost five months. I almost forgot how I felt stepping on the court once again. But it was just a couple of games; she made it really easy for me to try and enjoy it and go for it every time.”
Those comments echoed Murray’s sentiment from 2019 when he teamed up with the greatest women’s player of all time at Wimbledon. And despite being two members of tennis royalty, the Scot admitted he required a period of settling in due to the fact he didn’t know Williams that well.
“I didn’t know her particularly well. I mean, we had spoken to each other and stuff obviously before we went out to play mixed, but I didn’t know her that well,” he said at the time. “That was something that was actually, it was really nice for me, because I was nervous playing with her, obviously.
I hadn’t played loads in the build-up to it. Yeah, the fact that she was, I felt like she had a good sense of humour, anyway, and cracked a few jokes certainly early in the partnership helped me quite a lot. But I can’t share them in here, because they were of that nature! I thought that was cool.”
Despite any nerves, Alcaraz was still able to revel in the process mid-match as he found his footing. And it was during a change of ends that he said he was trying to simplify matters by doing exactly what he was told.
During a brief interview, he said: “I’m playing next to the one and only Serena Williams, so what else can I do? Just enjoy and try to do the things she told me to do.”
Again, that mirrored a very similar comment made by Murray from their time together as playing partners. When told Williams has dubbed their duo ‘Murena’, he simply smiled and responded: “Serena is the boss, so whatever she says goes.”
Following their defeat to Bencic and Cobolli, Alcaraz will shift his focus to the men’s singles. The draw for that competition will be made on Thursday, while Williams is not competing in the women’s singles.
