Tennis journalists highlight gulf between Big Three and Next-Gen: "A lot of that wave seems to have dissipated"

Renowned tennis journalists Ben Rothenberg and Tumaini Carayol spoke about the distance between the big three and the next-gen tennis players in a recent episode of Rothenberg's podcast.

Both of them closely followed the Australian Open and got to see the next-gen once again fail to dethrone a member of the big three. Novak Djokovic faced Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final and it was really a rather convincing win for Djokovic. Having played the entire event on a 3 cm tear in his hamstring makes the win even more impressive.

It also makes the next gen look even more powerless. The gulf in tennis skill is something the repoters spoke on the podacast:

"Seriously, on one hand, I think Djokovic is this good. Yes. He's 35 years old. Yes, he's old or whatever. Same with Nadal. Yes, they're old. But like the level he's playing is still incredible and still, you know, he's still so good. And, you know, regardless, he's better than he's a better tennis player than these guys. He would you know, that's just clear. He's just much better."

They further said:

"But I think what really just struck me and kind of irked me this year, it's just that a lot of that wave of next-gen just seems to have kind of dissipated. If you know, Medvedev got to number one and was, you know, incredibly good in the slams. But now he's going through a more difficult period. He could easily, easily bounce back from that and contend again. But he was clearly not a threat in any way."

They concluded:

"It's definitely a weird, strange period in men's tennis at the moment. Djokovic is still just, you know, just dominating as he did."