Carlos Alcaraz is not a fan of claims that he has to win every single tennis tournament he enters because it's unrealistic.
Besides being unrealistic, it can really affect the player mentally because if you treat every event you didn't win as a failure, then you're in trouble. Sometimes, it's about building and simply improving every day towards the goal of being the best possible player you can be.
That's the way Alcaraz likes to look at things and he talked about it at the 2023 ATP Finals after his win over Andrey Rublev, and by being the best possible player he can, he'll put himself in plenty of positions to win events.
He'll win some, he'll lose some, but the journey towards improvement is what matters in the end. If you don't believe it, look at Novak Djokovic. He's improved every single year on Tour, and it's mattered a lot more the older he got.
The American swing was a good swing for me. Even if I didn't take any title, I did a quarterfinals, a finals against Novak in Cincinnati was a pretty good job, and semifinal of a Grand Slam in US Open. I don't take that as a failure. Probably everybody, well, knows that I have to win every title or every tournament. I think that's a mistake.
For me, as I said, I've been struggling the last few months. Probably the Asian swing, Shanghai, probably those tournaments were not a good tournament for me. That's a shame for me, to end the year in that way.
Things are not looking terrible in Turin, though. He bested Rublev, which keeps him alive in the ATP Finals. His final match comes against Daniil Medvedev, a tough matchup for him but also a player he bested before.
Should he win that match, he'll find himself in the semi-final, and that would be a pretty decent way to end the year.