Carlos Alcaraz is going to be just fine.

He will likely win armloads of tour titles and Grand Slams. He should be a dominant force in his sport over the next decade, and probably two.

Still, for the third consecutive year, Alcaraz is stumbling into the finish of his season. Two years ago it was an injury. Last year it was a mental fog that lasted until March.

This year, ever since he left the China Open with the title and a third straight win over his biggest rival Jannik Sinner in a three-set classic, there’s been a little bit of both. A bug got to his stomach and his respiratory system. He has also admitted to wavering focus and a lack of fluency for the slick surfaces and still air of indoor hard-court tennis.

There’s also been the lingering exhaustion from a summer that included the Olympics, which ended with a gutting loss to Novak Djokovic in the gold medal match. None of these are illegitimate excuses for a perceived slump that reads out with a 14-4 record since the U.S. Open and a 77.8% win rate, the kind of figures that most tennis players dream about.

Most tennis players are not the heirs apparent to the greatest era in men’s tennis history, an expected avatar for the sport in years to come.

On Friday, the nasal strip across the bridge of his nose to help keep his passages clear for a second consecutive match in Turin at the ATP Tour Finals sort of said it all. Two losses in straight sets to Casper Ruud and Alexander Zverev, sandwiching a fairly routine and unsurprising win over an overmatched Andrey Rublev, and Alcaraz’s season is over. He’s been feeling it.

Carlos Alcaraz’s ATP Tour Finals ended in defeat to Alexander Zverev. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

“If someone says that he is fresh, he is lying,” Alcaraz said in a news conference after opening the week with the loss to Ruud. He described a long and demanding year, with scant off-days whether from tournaments or from injuries, which hamstrung his clay season until Roland Garros — where he won the French Open.  “Some players deal with it better than others. I’m tired. I’m tired mentally.”

Following Friday’s loss to Zverev, a one hour, 57 minute exercise in brilliance and frustration, Alcaraz, 21, spoke again of burnout with reporters. He still has to find some fuel for an emotional week of Davis Cup competition next week that will include the last matches of Rafael Nadal’s career.

He also acknowledged his tendency to play to extremes, the peaks and troughs that color a lot of chatter around his tennis lately — especially in the context of Sinner’s seemingly implacable ability to win.

“I’ve played great tournaments and really bad tournaments,” he said. Next year, he is looking for one thing: “More consistency.”

After a season with two majors out of four and two more titles, more consistency would be an enormous prospect for his competitors. They have the least bit of doubt about whether the Alcaraz they know and fear will return once the calendar flips and tennis gets played amid natural light and breezes. He is the sport’s human highlight reel, capable of shots they can’t even contemplate, with the steel to win four Grand Slam titles at 21 and post a 12-1 record in five-set matches. He isn’t going anywhere. They all know better than to glean anything remotely large from a sub-par six weeks for him at this time of the year.

“I told him he beat me too much this year, so I had to win at least once, one important one,” Zverev said of the laugh they shared at the net when it was over.

Alcaraz thinks he will one day be a great player on indoor courts. He knows he’s not there now, though, or maybe more accurately, he knows that he is very good but others are better. Growing up in temperate Spain, he rarely played indoors. He barely practices indoors. Over the years, he should accumulate enough matches to be more comfortable in that environment. But he’s not nearly there yet.

He fiddled with his backhand over the past few weeks, shortening his stroke to account for the way the ball slides indoors. At the Paris Masters he said the court was so fast it didn’t even feel like tennis.

“A lot of players are better than me on an indoor court,” he said.

His inability to pick the lock of Zverev’s serve on Friday looked concerning — until the consideration that the two break points Zverev faced in the second set were the first he has dealt with all tournament. Alcaraz’s own serve is a limiting factor on these courts and in his game, something else of which he is fully aware. When he took Djokovic apart in this year’s Wimbledon final, Djokovic was surprised, even rattled by how well Alcaraz served. Just as with indoor tennis, if Alcaraz can put things together, the rest of the tour will need to watch out.

For now, he hasn’t quite done it, in contrast to the total solidity of Zverev’s serve, which was an albatross of double faults and wobbly tosses not so long ago. The German lost around a point per service game until he met Alcaraz, but it’s the forehand return that spiralled into the roof off a second serve at 15-40 that will stick longer than the inroads Alcaraz made into that serve, for the player himself and for watching fans.

So too the two rally balls in the middle of the court he missed during the first-set tiebreak – a dumped forehand into the net and then a straightforward backhand punched several feet long. Set point down, after Zverev came up with a stylish half-volley off a backhand that looked to be firing down the line past him, Alcaraz anticipated a short ball. He overran it, forcing himself to stretch into a difficult volley that could have been a regulation groundstroke. He missed it. He stood in disbelief.

Carlos Alcaraz wants to improve his serve as he evolves. (Stefano Guidi / AFP via Getty Images)

As is his tendency, mixed in with all of this were two ridiculous shots. A down-the-line forehand pass and a backhand topspin lob that had Zverev wondering how in the world he had pulled that off, especially after what had come before.

“All of a sudden in the most important moments, he turns into a different person,” Zverev told reporters in his news conference. “All of a sudden you can’t hit a winner against him. All of a sudden he hits every single passing shot on the line. Like, you could put a coin there and he would hit it.”

Alcaraz rarely throws his racket. He did Friday after losing that tiebreak, slamming it down on his bag.

Then he came out and played a game that suggested his head was still in the last set. He smacked a forehand into the middle of the net from the middle of the court. He netted a half-hearted swat at a backhand on break point, and that was pretty much that. He can put a ball on a coin, but he does not have Zverev’s multiple Tour Finals appearances, and titles, and years of being the hunter of the ‘Big Three’ of Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Alcaraz has been the hunted almost since he has been an ATP Tour tennis player. He has to acclimatize with a target on his back.

In the final moments, after his last winner of the day, he raised his arms to the crowd for the first time, trying to rally them behind him. Win or lose, that Alcaraz, the joyful entertainer, the player who seems able to come up with the greatest shot in the most important moment, has been missing in action for a little while now.

He also wasn’t around when he wanted him to be on Friday, which makes all the highlight reel points he does win feel a little like cotton candy.

“I’ve played unbelievable points, unbelievable games but in some matches when the chances is there I miss a lot,” he said in his news conference.

“I have to work to be more consistent. Let’s see.”

(Top photo: Shi Tang / Getty Images)