Tennis365 wants Shanghai to change its balls. Zizou Bergs, who beat Alcaraz with them, has the better case

Nine of the top 16 seeds were gone from the Rolex Shanghai Masters before the fourth round, Carlos Alcaraz and Taylor Fritz among them. Tennis365’s Liam McMillen has seen enough. In a column published on Monday night, “Carlos Alcaraz and Taylor Fritz’s defeats prove the Shanghai Masters has to make a major change”, he argues the balls are wearing out too fast and that the event risks becoming one players would rather skip.

By Tuesday morning the man who beat Alcaraz had answered him. “Balls are completely the same obviously as the last tournament. It’s not an issue with the balls,” Zizou Bergs told reporters, as quoted by the same outlet. Both cannot be right about the balls. On the evidence, Bergs is closer.

The case for the prosecution

McMillen builds his column on two complaints. Fritz, before he lost to Stefanos Tsitsipas, put it bluntly: “These balls are very fast when they’re new, and then they wear down at an insane rate. Once they’re worn out, my God, it’s torture trying to close out a point.” Alcaraz went further during his 7-5, 7-6(4) defeat to Bergs, overheard between points: “How can one ball bounce and another slide right over me? I can’t play like this, I don’t understand it. I can’t play by intuition.”

From there the column reaches its conclusion: the conditions are “much worse at this year’s event and the number of seeds that have dropped out of the tournament is a testament to that.” He also notes that organizers sped the courts up after last year’s slow surface and heat, and asks whether faster courts help anyone if the balls go flat.

Bergs has the better evidence

Bergs’ point is simple and checkable: the same ball was used at the Japan Open the week before, and Alcaraz won that tournament. A ball that let him lift a trophy in Tokyo did not turn into a different object on the flight to China. Even Alcaraz’s own post-match description cuts against the column. “Today the ball was bigger and it was a little bit slower,” he said. Fritz complained the balls were too fast when new. Two leading players describing the same ball in opposite terms is not a pattern. It is two players having a bad day.

Fritz deserves a footnote too. McMillen himself concedes the American “is often disparaging about the balls on the ATP Tour calendar”. When a player criticizes the ball almost everywhere, one more complaint in Shanghai tells you about the player before it tells you about the tournament.

The court is the real story

Where the column has a point, it is in the line it passes over quickly: the courts. Bergs himself admitted “sometimes there is a little wrong bounce on the court”, maybe one shot in ten or twenty. Alcaraz said the court felt “way different” after just two days. And Novak Djokovic, beaten 6-4, 6-3 by Hubert Hurkacz in his opener, called it “a super-fast surface, completely different from Beijing”, where he had won the title days earlier.

That is three players, three different matches, one common complaint, and it is about the surface. Djokovic also explained what a quick court does to a match: losing serve once per set, he said, was enough to lose. Alcaraz’s defeat fits that shape exactly, two tight sets settled by a handful of points. Our read: the seed cull says more about a fast, occasionally uneven court than about the ball. When one break decides a set, the gap between the best players and the rest narrows, and the draw opens up. Look at the fourth-round line-up: Bergs, Arthur Gea, Botic van de Zandschulp and Hurkacz all reached the last 16, while Alcaraz, Ben Shelton, Frances Tiafoe and Arthur Fils went home.

Our verdict

McMillen is right that Shanghai has a conditions problem and right to warn that players remember these things when they plan their calendars. He has picked the wrong culprit. Swapping the ball would not change anything that happened this week; Bergs, who played Alcaraz with the very ball under suspicion, says it was fine, and the tournament before used the same one without complaint. The fix belongs underfoot: a court that bounces true and sits closer to the pace players found in Beijing. If organizers take one thing from the column, it should be the sentence about the surface, not the one about the balls.

For the match itself, read our report on Bergs’ win over Alcaraz. If you want to know how a ball or line call is checked, our explainer on electronic line calling covers it.

Sources: Tennis365, ATP Tour, Punto de Break.