Marion Bartoli is blunt about Jannik Sinner: “What are we even talking about?”

Former Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli spoke to Sky Sports and expressed concern about the recent injuries to Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, a sign that something isn’t right on the tour. The Italian missed the U.S. Open due to a knee problem, while the champion from Murcia was sidelined for over four months due to wrist issues, forcing him to withdraw from Roland Garros and Wimbledon.

According to Bartoli, there’s a common thread linking all these injuries among top-ranked players: “The problem is that the courts are getting slower and slower, but the balls are extremely heavy. I understand that the ATP and the WTA want to make tennis more attractive and want longer rallies; they don’t want it to turn into a serving contest, but at the same time, we have to take the players’ health into account, because without players, there is no tour.”

According to the former French athlete, we need to go back to the way things were for the sake of the players and the sport: “Whether it’s making the surface faster or making the ball faster, we need to take corrective action and go back to how it was before. Because if we keep losing one tournament to Sinner and the next to Alcaraz, what are we even talking about?”

Sinner’s schedule for the end of the season is already set: the schedule calls for a return to action at the tournaments in Beijing and Shanghai in late September and early October, followed by the Six Kings Slam in Riyadh, the Paris-Bercy Masters 1000, and the ATP Finals in Turin, where the Italian aims to reaffirm his position at the top of international tennis for the third consecutive year. Meanwhile, Carlos Alcaraz is trying to regain his best form at the US Open: the former world No. 1 defeated Portugal’s Tiago Faria in four sets last night, advancing to the third round of the season’s final Grand Slam.