Draper retires injured from Australian Open as Alcaraz reaches quarter-finals
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Jack Draper’s mid-match retirement against the reigning Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz was the result of a hip injury that he described as “a ticking time bomb”. Remarkably, Draper had managed to fight through three five-set marathons, spending 12½ hours on the court, on his way to this fourth-round meeting with Alcaraz at the Australian Open.
But he explained after the match that he had never fully recovered from the hip tendinitis that he had been dealing with during his off-season training block in December. “I was really, really sore after I played my last match,” Draper explained. “Essentially, I’ve had tendinitis in my hip, which I had to get an MRI [scan] to look at and stuff. I have had a history of problems in that area. Like, it hasn’t gone away. I’m still dealing with that.
“In the pre-season, it went into my back and I couldn’t walk and it was really difficult. I have come here and I have been managing that. Today, from the third game, I felt like I had multiple areas that were really in pain, and especially the hip.”.
The retirement came after two sets of a match which, unsurprisingly, had failed to catch light. Draper seemed to be in the contest in the early stages, breaking Alcaraz’s serve to fight back from 5-2 and level at 5-5. But neither man was playing with much authority, and Draper soon dropped his serve for a second time to go down by a 7-5 margin.
