With Casper Ruud defeating Taylor Fritz in the opening set of their round-robin match in Turin, Rafael Nadal was eliminated from the ATP Finals, and Carlos Alcaraz was also assured of finishing the year as the world\u2019s top player.<\/p>\n
Nadal needed to win the competition to overtake country compatriot Alcaraz atop the rankings, but after losing in straight sets to Fritz on Sunday and Felix Auger-Aliassime earlier on Tuesday, he was now depending on Ruud to suffer a similar fate to keep his hopes alive. The Norwegian, however, defeated Fritz in the opening set 6-3 before beating the American.<\/p>\n
19-year-old Alcaraz, who is not playing at the tournament as he is forced to withdraw following injury, will be officially recognised as the youngest year-end No. 1 since the ATP rankings\u2019 advent in 1973. For the first time since 2009, record-setting 22-time grand slam champion Nadal has now dropped four straight ATP Tour matches after falling to Canada\u2019s Auger-Aliassime 6-3, 6-4. In his final group match against Fritz, Auger-Aliassime, who is currently being coached by Toni, Nadal\u2019s uncle and longtime mentor who sat in his box, will have a chance to advance to the round of 16.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Nadal still has a match against Ruud at the ATP Finals, but the player has lost the chance to win the title following his two consecutive losses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nadal needed to win the competition to overtake country compatriot Alcaraz atop the rankings. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":38601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3429,2668,2538,2221,336],"class_list":["post-17858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tennis","tag-atp-finals","tag-carlos-alcaraz","tag-casper-ruud","tag-felix-auger-aliassime","tag-rafael-nadal"],"reading_time":"2 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}