Five Things We’ve Learned From The 2025 Asian Swing

It is instructive to compare Anisimova with Paolini, because the Italian also reached two Major Singles finals in 2024, at the French Open and Wimbledon. However, whereas she has been unable to replicate that form in 2025 (other than recently in Shengzhen, when she helped Italy to retain the Billie-Jean King Cup), it seems likely that Anisimova will not only match her 2025 feats in 2026 but improve upon them by winning a Major.

1. Alexander Zverev’s Career Seems To Have Stalled

It says everything about Alcaraz and Sinner’s current domination of men’s tennis that Alexander Zverev remains the third highest-ranked man in the ATP Pepperstone rankings. That is despite the fact that he has endured a largely miserable 2025, the high-point of which seems likely to be his performance at the start of it, when he reached the Australian Open final. However, he was dismissed so easily by Jannik Sinner in that final that the idea it represents a high-point is itself absurd. And Zverev’s defeat to Arthur Rinderknech at the Shanghai Masters was just the latest in a long line of recent defeats to men he would once have beaten in straightforward fashion, if not straight sets.

Zverev is probably the biggest victim of the great “Changeover” in men’s tennis in recent years, to cite the title of Giri Nathan’s new book about how the Alcaraz-Sinner duopoly has replaced the great Trivalry of Djokovic, Nadal and Federer. Having emerged as a virtual child prodigy towards the end of the Big Three era (albeit one who had benefited hugely from having followed an older brother on tour for many years), Zverev seemed best-placed to replace The Big Three when they finally called it a day. Instead, he has been completely usurped by Alcaraz and Sinner.

Zverev will be 29 next April and although The Big Three demonstrated that tennis players can now play on until they are nearer 40 than 30, it will be doubtful how long Zverev will want to continue playing unless he can radically improve his game and finally challenge Alcaraz and Sinner in the biggest events and the biggest finals. Yet that scenario looks more remote than ever after a year in which the obvious limitations of his game, especially in comparison with the all-court and all-surface games of Alcaraz and Sinner, have been brutally exposed.

1. Emma Raducanu Is Likely To Collapse After Not Taking Match-points

The greatest and most universally applicable quotation is probably Oscar Wilde’s famous line from The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” It can be used to describe almost anything, from the fortunes (or otherwise) of US presidential candidates to the recent fortunes of Emma Raducanu.

Next year, it will be five years since Raducanu achieved her own personal Fairytale of New York and won the 2021 US Open as a qualifier. Since then, of course, she has been beset by injury and coaching issues and it is only in the last 18 months that she has suggested that she can get anywhere near the world’s top 20, let alone challenge for a Major Singles title again.

However, recent events in Asia seem to have stymied her recent surge of form, because she has twice collapsed in the final set against higher-ranked opposition after failing to take match-points against them: first against Barbora Krejcikova in Korea; and then against Jessica Pegula in Beijing. And perhaps the most disappointing aspect of both losses was that on both occasions she virtually collapsed in the final set, losing 6-1 against Krejcikova and then being bagelled against Pegula.

Raducanu is proving all the potential that she still possesses by getting into such advantageous, indeed match-winning positions against vaunted opponents, but she must learn how to close out such matches. And at the very least, she must not keep collapsing completely in final sets but somehow find a way to remain competitive in them, whatever her disappointment about failing to take match-points.

1. Tien Might Be Most Successful “Next-Genner” Since Sinner and Alcaraz

The Next Gen Finals, which only began in 2017, had appeared to be a sure-fire predictor of future success, given that both Jannik Sinner (the winner in 2019) and Carlos Alcaraz (the winner in 2021) were among its earliest champions. In recent years, however, the Next Gen pipeline of future champions has slowed down considerably, with none of the last three winners of the event (Brandon Nakashima, Hamad Medjedovic and João Fonseca) achieving anything like the success that both Sinner and Alcaraz achieved almost immediately after their Next Gen victories.

Fonseca was probably the most highly-fancied of those three most recent winners. However, it was actually the young man he beat in the 2024 Next Gen final, the USA’s Learner Tien, who has arguably made the biggest strides of any “Next-Genner” since Sinner and Alcaraz. Put simply, Tien has had a fairly stellar 2025. It began with his beating Daniil Medvedev at the Australian Open, less than a month after reaching the 2024 Next Gen final, and it has largely continued on an upward trajectory ever since, culminating in his reaching the China Open final against Sinner last week.

However, Tien was relatively easily beaten by Sinner in that final and it remains questionable whether he has the “weapons” (principally, a big enough serve and forehand) to really challenge Alcaraz and Sinner at the top of the men’s game. Nevertheless, given that he has already proven that he is a super-quick Learner both by name and nature, it is not inconceivable that he will continue to develop apace – and probably much faster than his Next Gen contemporaries.