Wimbledon 2019: Naomi Osaka, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Alexander Zverev's lack of grasscourt experience stands out in disappointing first-round exits

Stefanos Tsitsipas had gone into Wimbledon with fighting talk, and wanting to see “something different.” Of all the Grand Slams, the Big W has been the strongest bastion of the Big Four. Since Roger Federer won the first of his eight titles in 2003, no one outside the Big Four (Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray) has won the Championship.

“I feel like I can beat them,” the 20-year-old Greek had said ahead of Wimbledon. “My game will be at its finest if some of the Next Gen players believe that, if the younger generations think positively, I think we can achieve a lot of things. I hope this will happen at Wimbledon.”

So far, not so good for the younger generation.

On Monday, the first day of the Championship, three of the biggest stars in the Gen Next of tennis were bumped out. Two-time Grand Slam champion and World No 2 Naomi Osaka went down 7-6 (4), 6-2 to Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva. Meanwhile, in the men’s draw, Tsitsipas lost a close five-setter to Thomas Fabbiano and 22-year-old Alexander Zverev was defeated 6-4, 3-6, 2-6, 5-7 by Czech qualifier Jiri Vesely.

Even though Wimbledon is hailed as the spiritual home of the sport, lawn tennis has long outgrown its green roots. With grasscourts being uprooted and replaced with concrete the world over, the new generation of players is mainly bred on hard or clay courts. Bernard Tomic (2011) and Nick Kyrgios (2014) are the only players to have reached the Wimbledon men’s quarter-final as teenagers this decade.

The shift is not surprising, given that the oldest tennis surfaces command attention for only five weeks in a tennis season. While the French Open has a long tune-up season, Wimbledon is restricted to three weeks, in which players have to dust off the memories of Parisian clay and put on their grass shoes.

Between them, the three bright young stars of the game have two Grand Slams and 14 tour titles, none of which have come on grass. Osaka, who was playing her third Wimbledon, has cemented her place as a big match-player, winning two Grand Slams (2018 US Open, 2019 Australian Open) and one Masters event (2018 Indian Wells). Zverev, who has won 10 ATP titles, six on hard courts and four on clay while Tsitsipas – also playing at Wimbledon for the third time – owns three ATP titles, two on hard courts and one on clay.

If their names carried certain expectations, their form in the Wimbledon prep events wasn’t the most promising. Osaka had only one warm-up event, essentially two matches, as she lost in the second round of the Birmingham Classic, also to Putintseva, also in straight sets. Zverev started his grass season with a second-round defeat in Stuttgart to fellow German Dustin Brown, who was playing only his second tour-level match of the year. In the next week, he went out in the quarter-finals at Halle. Tsitsipas had an identical run, losing in the second round at s-Hertogenbosch and a quarter-final finish at Queens.

Brought up on the Pembroke Pines public courts in Florida, Osaka looked lost in the serenely green and exclusive surroundings at Wimbledon. The 21-year-old is a hard-hitting hard-courter and just couldn’t find her range against the more-experienced Kazakh. The first Japanese to win a Slam, Osaka had 34 winners and 38 unforced errors to her name, while Putintseva was clinical, hitting 15 winners and only seven unforced errors.

“I remember how much I hated grasscourts,” said Putintseva, 24, after the biggest win of her career. “With my coach, I was fighting. I was saying that I don’t want to play here. I used to play more on clay courts. Clay courts it’s more spin, dropshots, serve kick and stuff. When I came on grass, was totally opposite. For my mental (sic), it was like killing myself. It took some time.”

While Osaka just couldn’t deal with the way Putintseva mixed up the pace and spin, Zverev and Tsitsipas openly spoke of their discomfort on the surface.

A familiar face in Zverev’s player box was Ivan Lendl, the same player who once dismissed Wimbledon as “grass is for cows.” On Monday, the Czech sat stone-faced as his ward stuttered and stumbled his way on a pristine Day 1 lawn at SW19. Despite hitting 24 aces, the 6’6 Zverev, who admittedly had “below zero confidence,” couldn’t find a way past the canny Vesely, who had breezed through the three rounds of qualifying without dropping a set. Better tuned up for grass, Vesely won 38 of 45 net points while Zverev looked exposed at the net, winning only 26 of the 52 points.

“Let’s be realistic: grass is not my favorite surface if you look at the past,” said Zverev, whose best performance at Wimbledon came in 2017 when he reached the fourth round. “Even though I had a very good draw here, Wimbledon is always tough for me. Especially if I play someone like Vesely in the first round, who serves very well, I thought returned extremely well today.”

Tsitsipas, who makes no bones of just how much he expects of himself, battled for more than three hours against Fabbiano, the grass and his emotions, but eventually lost 6-4, 3-6, 6-4, 7-6(7), 6-3. The Greek, known for his philosophical social media posts, was scathing in his assessment.

“I felt very uncomfortable,” he said. “I changed my technique. I’ve changed my movement accordingly, according to the surface. When I’m playing out there, I don’t really play my game the way I want to play just because the grass just forces you to change. You have to stay lower. You have to kind of make these micro changes in your game, the way you serve, because the ball is sliding, the ball is staying low. That’s what I’m really frustrated about. I don’t play my game. I play someone else’s game. Yeah, that p**ses me off. I had a lot of mishits today during the match. It felt like I couldn’t deal with the ball. It felt like, as I said before, a coordination problem. It felt like I was lost, going for too much or going for nothing. There was no balance in what I was doing.

“I was really disappointed (after losing to Stan Wawrinka in five sets at the French Open). I am disappointed now. People expected things from me. I didn’t deliver.”

While the young Greek showed a lot of ambition in hoping to change the tennis hierarchy, there’s a reason why the tennis world mostly restores order at its only grass-court Grand Slam. There hasn’t been a first-time Grand Slam winner in the men’s section since Federer in 2003 and only two in the highly volatile women’s field for a decade – Petra Kvitova in 2011 and Marion Bartoli in 2013.

It takes experience to grasp, and appreciate, the subtleties of grass.