LONDON (Reuters) -Taylor Fritz knows that elite tennis can be an unforgiving classroom at times, but he is determined to learn lessons from painful defeats like the one he suffered at the hands of Carlos Alcaraz at Wimbledon on Friday.
Fritz was beaten 6-4 5-7 6-3 7-6(6) by the Spaniard in a compelling semi-final at the All England Club in which he sporadically ruffled the twice-defending champion's feathers before falling to defeat.
Yet the American, who also lost to world number one Jannik Sinner in last year's U.S. Open final, does not want to view these losses as a failure, but as part of an invaluable learning curve for his Grand Slam ambitions.
"Every time I play these guys, I learn a lot about what I need to do to improve and get better," Fritz said.
"Moving ahead, I just want to keep working on the things that are going to get me better, that are going to help me compete with these guys because at the end of the day, my ultimate goal is to win a slam," the world number five added.
If Fritz was hoping to learn about any weaknesses that he could exploit in Alcaraz's game, Friday's defeat left him with little to go on.
"He just does everything so well," Fritz explained. "I think for a long time people said his serve was one of the weaker parts of his game. There's zero weakness with his serve the way he was serving today."
On a scorching Centre Court, Alcaraz's serve was red-hot.
He won 100% of his first serve points in the first set and in the third Fritz gained a single point in total on the Alcaraz delivery.
Part of the problem for Fritz was that simply getting the serve back was never going to be enough to unsettle Alcaraz, with the American knowing that one poor return could end the point before it began and playing it safe would hand the Spaniard easy winners.
"I know that I can't just make the return because he'll just drill the ball open court, and I'll lose the point," he said.
"There's not much point in me blocking a return back and just losing the point anyway," the 27-year-old added, explaining that Alcaraz's comfort with serve and volley meant that chipped returns would only work for a point or two.
"I think the long-term thing I could have done was just do what I was doing, but just return better and return more aggressively," he said. "I think that's something I need to get a lot better at, is returning aggressively."
(Reporting by Toby Davis, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
