Alcaraz C. vs Zverev A.

The world number two, Carlos Alcaraz, will make his delayed debut at the ATP World Tour Finals on Monday when he faces Alexander Zverev in his first Red group encounter.

Along with Alcaraz and Zverev, who has previously won two year-end titles, there is also the interesting Russian combo of Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev.

Alcaraz was scheduled to compete in the ATP Finals last year, following his victory at the 2022 US Open. However, he was forced to withdraw due to a serious abdominal ailment, allowing Novak Djokovic to win the sixth and final title of the year.

A year later, Djokovic and Alcaraz are both vying for the top spot in Turin at the end of the year, but it would take an extremely unlikely sequence of events for the Spaniard to dethrone the 24-time Grand Slam champion before 2024.

To be at the top of the rankings at the end of the year for the second consecutive year, Alcaraz needs to win the ATP Finals title without losing a single match—this is not an impossible feat—and hope that Djokovic loses every match he plays in the group stage.

Even though the later series of events is at most fantastical, Alcaraz can only concentrate on his successes on the Italian surface as he tries to recover.

While his 63-10 year-to-date record and his titles from Wimbledon, Indian Wells, Madrid, Queen's Club, Barcelona, and Argentina are certainly noteworthy, the 20-year-old's experience is nothing compared to that of an accomplished ATP Finals contender like Zverev.

When it comes to severe injuries, the seventh-seeded German player has a lot in common with Alcaraz. He famously had to leave his 2022 French Open semifinal against Rafael Nadal in a wheelchair due to torn ankle ligaments, which prevented him from competing in the ATP Finals for the first time since 2016.

Though Zverev reached the semi-finals in 2019 and has two ATP Finals victories from 2018 and 2021, he is no stranger to defeating the greatest players in the world at year-end championships. However, his campaigns in 2017 and 2020 ended in round-robin losses.

Zverev has advanced to the quarterfinals of the US Open and the French Open for the third time since his return, but he was ousted in all but one of his previous matches before the quarterfinals.

Stefanos Tsitsipas ended Zverev's Paris campaign in the third round earlier this month, but the German was still able to win two titles this season, the Hamburg European Open in July and the Chengdu Open in September, to secure his first top-tier titles since the 2021 ATP Finals.

With a 53-22 record, the seventh seed is coming to Turin for this month's intriguing tournament. Zverev, who acknowledged at the beginning of 2023 that he was not considering returning to the ATP Finals, could now be five matches away from a third piece of year-end glory.