Published On: Mon, Apr 14th, 2025

Ben Shelton’s doubles drama and a battle between good strategy and on-court etiquette

Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.

This week, Ben Shelton caused some drama on the doubles court, the U.S. Billie Jean King Cup team dealt with a string of withdrawals and one player was very honest about the “bulls—” that can accompany tennis matches.

Is this doubles player really ‘so soft’?

“It’s doubles, bro’. It’s tennis, it’s not a baseball.”

Not some trash talk sent across a recreational court last weekend, but rather American world No. 15 Ben Shelton’s reaction to one of the world’s top doubles players complaining about some body-line groundstrokes.

Shelton, who lost his opening match in the Monte Carlo Masters singles to Spain’s Alejandro Davidovich Fokina last Monday, also paired up with Rohan Bopanna for its doubles event. They beat Italian pair Andrea Vavassori and Simone Bolelli in the round of 16, and come the end of the match, Vavassori castigated Shelton for unloading a few forehands in his general direction and hitting him in the chest with one.

After making the comparison between tennis and baseball — and showing Vavassori, who has reached three of the past five Grand Slam doubles finals with Bolelli, a bruise of his own — Shelton said “So soft, so soft” before remembering that he and Bopanna had won the match and unleashing a “Vamos!” in the applauding crowd’s direction.

Later, Vavassori announced he had pulled out of the Barcelona Open doubles this week with a rib injury.

Shelton had struck the Italian with a forehand drive volley at the start of the second game of the match. Vavassori, stood up at the net with his partner at the baseline, was caught ball-watching after hitting a floaty volley off another Shelton forehand.

Singles players routinely react with varying intensities of glare if an opponent sends a smash in their direction, because there is often more open court at which to aim. But hitting the ball to the player with the least time to react — whether in a volley exchange or a situation like this — is a fundamental of good doubles strategy. Had Shelton sent that forehand back deep to Bolelli, Vavassori’s partner would have had more time to get ready to receive the ball and reset the point.

Nobody likes being on the receiving end of a stinger to the chest, and Vavassori likely knew he was on the hook as soon as his shot looped into the air, but to chastise someone for playing the correct shot in a given situation is a lot.

How did Team U.S. cope with some late withdrawals for the Billie Jean King Cup?

The United States appeared to be in a spot of bother heading into last week’s Billie Jean King Cup qualifiers, after three top players withdrew simultaneously with only days to go. On Wednesday (April 9), world No. 3 Jessica Pegula, world No. 32 Danielle Collins and world No. 43 McCartney Kessler all pulled out of the matches against Denmark and Slovakia, which were played Saturday and Sunday.

Alycia Parks, Bernarda Pera and Hailey Baptiste (the world No. 53, 76 and 86 respectively) replaced them, with the trickiest tie set to be Slovakia — led by world No. 37 Rebecca Šramková, they beat the U.S. in the first round at last year’s Billie Jean King Cup finals, ultimately losing to Italy in the final itself. With both Slovakia and the U.S. beating Denmark, the two nations faced off again yesterday for a place in the 2025 finals, to be held in Shenzhen, China in September.

Neither Pera nor Baptiste had contested a Billie Jean King Cup tie before this week. Then they were thrust into a showdown with qualification on the line, against a team that had beaten theirs less than a year ago — and were playing on that team’s home court in Bratislava, too.

They were not cowed.

Baptiste beat the highly-rated Renáta Jamrichová, 17, in straight sets. Then Pera faced Šramková, and went down 5-6 on the Slovak’s serve in the first set. She broke, then won the tiebreak. Pera went 4-0 down in the second set but came back again, and ultimately took it 7-5 to send her team to China.

“I’m so overwhelmed with the emotions. I’m so happy. I just told Lindsay this has been one of the best weeks ever… The whole team was just amazing, and I’m so, so happy I got to experience this,” Pera said.

She, Baptiste and Parks have given captain Lindsay Davenport a tough decision to make when those finals come around.

When does a tennis match become a ‘s— match’? Ask Davidovich Fokina

One of the greatest sights in tennis is both players in a match performing well simultaneously. It’s also one of the rarer ones, with one competitor usually outdoing the other.

More frequent are matches in which they both aren’t performing so well. These can be just as fascinating as a peak-level match, if not as pretty — a fierce battle, a compelling tussle, an exhibition of the mental toll the sport can take on players.

They can also be a bit rubbish, though. And that was exactly what Davidovich Fokina felt about his Monte Carlo Masters win over Britain’s Jack Draper on Thursday. With 10 breaks of serve in the 31 games, Davidovich Fokina triumphed 3-6, 6-7(6), 6-4 in a match that saw him apologize to his coaching team for his behavior afterward, saying in his on-court interview that he was playing better tennis, but, “my mind was saying me a lot of bulls—.”

Later, an interviewer for Dutch channel Ziggo Sport told him that it was an “amazing match.” In response, Fokina said: “If it was for you an amazing match, I think you are lying. Today was a very s— match.”

Watching two players toil through having their shots not do what they want them to do is understandably more compelling for a spectator than it is for the people involved.

Draper also hit 10 double faults as his first serve largely deserted him, while both players converted attacking positions into points less often than the tour average. That’s where the match perhaps looked closer to “s—” than compelling, with the seesawing tension created less by push-and-pull rallies than it was by confusing misses early in points.

Still, according to TennisViz, Fokina’s overall performance in that match rated a smidge higher than his average.

“S—” tennis is in the eye of the beholder after all.

When to move on from a successful coaching partnership?

Ahead of this week’s Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart, Germany, world No. 6 Jasmine Paolini confirmed on Instagram that Marc Lopez, the 2016 Olympic men’s doubles champion alongside Rafael Nadal, had joined her coaching team.

The 29-year-old had parted ways with Renzo Furlan in late March, bringing an end to a hugely successful partnership that last year saw Paolini reach two Grand Slam finals; for Italy, she won Olympic doubles gold and the Billie Jean King Cup. Furlan was voted the WTA’s Coach of the Year for 2024, in recognition of what was a transformative period for Paolini.

Tennis saw a similar dynamic at play in October when Iga Świątek, then world No. 1, split with Tomasz Wiktorowski after three glittering years together which delivered four Grand Slam titles. Świątek replaced Wiktorowski with Wim Fissette, who had experienced a similar situation the previous month, when he and Naomi Osaka ended their partnership after a two-and-a-half-year run during which she won two of her four career Grand Slams.

Last year also saw Jessica Pegula split with David Witt, her coach of five years. Pegula, who had enjoyed a similar rise to Paolini between 2020 and 2022, brought on Mark Knowles and Mark Merklein in the February. Over the 14 months since, she has reached her first Grand Slam final and is back at No. 3 in the world, with a chance of claiming the No. 2 spot for the first time.

That could be a useful reference point for Paolini, who will believe she can achieve even more than she did in her breakthrough year of 2024.

As for what she looks for in a coach, Paolini told at the WTA Finals in November that “the main thing is to trust them.”

She begins a new era on Tuesday with a first-round match in Stuttgart, against home favorite Eva Lys, the world No. 68.

Shot of the week

There were a lot of excellent shots in Monte Carlo, but it had to be Carlos Alcaraz this time.

Recommended reading:

Alcaraz surges past ailing Musetti for Monte Carlo title and No. 2 ranking

Ukraine’s tennis team dedicates Billie Jean King Cup victory to nation’s soldiers

The endless rebirth of tennis on clay

Tennis players love golf — but how good are their swings?

🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Carlos Alcaraz (2) def. Lorenzo Musetti (13) 3-6, 6-1, 6-0 to win the Monte Carlo Masters (1,000) in Monte Carlo, Monaco. It is his sixth ATP 1,000 title.

📈📉 On the rise / Down the line

📈 Carlos Alcaraz moves up one place from No. 3 to No. 2 after his win at the Monte Carlo Masters.

📈 Anastasia Zakharova ascends 20 spots from No. 127 to No. 107 after winning the ITF W100 event in Zaragoza, Spain.

📈 Lorenzo Musetti rises five positions from No. 16 to No. 11 via his run to the final at the Monte Carlo Masters.

📉 Stefanos Tsitsipas falls eight places from No. 8 to No. 16. Last year’s Monte Carlo Masters champion drops out of the top 15 for the first time since October 2018.

📉 Casper Ruud drops three positions from No. 7 to No. 10, with just a 15-point gap to Musetti at No. 11.

📉 Thanasi Kokkinakis tumbles 15 spots from No. 92 to No. 107, leaving the top 100 for the first time since April 2024.

📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP 

📍Barcelona, Spain: Barcelona Open (500) featuring Carlos Alcaraz, Arthur Fils, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Alex de Minaur.

📍Munich: Munich Open (500) featuring Alexander Zverev, Ben Shelton, Gael Monfils, Jakub Menšík.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA

📍Stuttgart, Germany: Tennis Grand Prix (500) featuring Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff.

📍Rouen, France: Rouen Open (250) featuring Elina Svitolina, Bianca Andreescu, Maria Sakkari, Linda Noskova.

📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men’s and women’s tours continue.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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