Taylor Fritz has never hidden his distaste for on-court coaching. Back in 2022, fresh off beating Cameron Norrie at this same tournament, he said: “I hate on-court coaching because I feel like I can be analytical in my own head, figure it out myself, and I just think it’s up to the player to figure it out for themselves”. Which makes it a little funny that on Saturday night at The O2 in London, in the middle of arguably his toughest match of the weekend, Fritz was hanging on every word Alex de Minaur fed him from the Team World bench, and cracking jokes about it in the process.

De Minaur had spotted something after Carlos Alcaraz had just shanked a ball. The Australian, picking up on how the court was playing, turned to his teammate with a tip: “That last one when you went that same ball but to the forehand… this court is actually jumping up”. His point was that the bounce off this particular surface was sitting up higher than Alcaraz liked, and it had already happened at least once that when Fritz rolled his heavy, looping forehand into that corner, the Spaniard was struggling to deal with it.

Then came Fritz’s reply, which drew laughs up and down the bench. “I do, I do get a little scared, sometimes rolling into his forehand”, he admitted.

But on a day when Fritz had a chance to repeat the one thing nobody else had managed, on the other side of the net, Alcaraz was leaning on some advice of his own that eventually triumphed.

Laver Cup has allowed this kind of real-time coaching since its first edition in 2017, when Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer sat on the Team Europe bench feeding tips to Dominic Thiem. Something that remains heavily restricted in standard singles matches elsewhere on tour, and it’s a big part of why the benches at this event are more entertaining than anywhere else.

But Fritz’s fear of Alcaraz’s forehand is not the only thing that has apparently made him nervous on a tennis court. Andre Agassi once joked that Fritz “sees alligators inside the service line,” referring to the American’s reluctance to move forward and finish points at the net. Ironically, Fritz fired a backhand volley winner on his first match point to give Team World a 15-9 victory over Team Europe at the 2025 Laver Cup, after having become the only player to have beaten Alcaraz in singles in this tournament. That victory in San Francisco was also the first time Fritz had ever beaten Alcaraz. So, looking to add more to his name, Fritz took the tip and ran with it.

He kept finding that forehand corner, as de Minaur had told him, “You gotta have that depth, right?”, and warned him not to overdo it since Alcaraz would adjust fast. It all worked well enough to get Fritz through the second set 6-4, levelling the match after dropping the first 3-6. What followed was a match tiebreak neither player will forget in a hurry.

Serving to close it out, Fritz held two match points, at 10-9 and 11-10, and Alcaraz saved both, the first with an ace and the second with a drop shot pulled from nowhere, before sealing it 13-11 with one more delicate touch at the net. The final score read 6-3, 4-6, 13-11, in what was one of the finest matches in the Laver Cup’s nine-year history.

It marked the second time that weekend Alcaraz had gotten the better of Fritz, after he and Jakub Mensik had beaten Fritz and Alexander Bublik in Friday’s doubles. It also stretched Alcaraz’s head-to-head lead over the American to 6-1, with the memory of that San Francisco loss clearly on Alcaraz’s mind.

“I was thinking a little bit about last year. I was trying not to let it happen again. I was kind of nervous in the beginning, I’m not going to lie, but I’m really happy I took it in the end,” he said afterward.

As for the nervousness, Alcaraz later revealed what got him through it. Casper Ruud, watching from the Team Europe bench, told him during the match tiebreak to stay calm and stop trying to overplay, reminding him his shots were already better than Fritz’s without needing to force anything. Alcaraz called the advice “really beautiful and really helpful” for closing out the tiebreak.

For Alcaraz’s fans, the victory offered a welcome glimpse of the player they had been waiting to see since his return. This was his first win over a top-ten opponent since the Australian Open back in January, where he’d completed the career Grand Slam, before a right-wrist injury forced him into a four-and-a-half-month layoff.

He injured his right wrist in Barcelona in April, an absence that cost him the French Open, Wimbledon and both North American hard-court Masters events before he returned at the US Open and lost in the quarter-finals to Ben Shelton.

That said, the Team World captain once described Fritz as having “an impressive short-term memory loss” when it comes to wins and losses. That mindset may come in handy now; after all, there will be another point, another match and, quite possibly, another chance to make Alcaraz’s forehand a little less frightening.