Brisbane, QLD, Australia, 21 November 2024 | Dan Imhoff

Plenty of times Nick Kyrgios has reached the crossroads any top athlete forced to stare down serious injury in their prime has faced: would the rehabilitation even be worth it.

Following almost two years on the sidelines, the 2022 Wimbledon finalist is about to find out just how he and his refurbished wrist stack up at the Brisbane International and Australian Open in January.

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Wrist surgery tended to be one of the more complicated operations a tennis player had to overcome for the chance to compete at a high level again, but a return to southwest London in June this year – to the site of his deepest run at a Grand Slam – afforded Kyrgios a few shots at putting his body to the test between commentary duties.

If not for a handful of practice sessions on the grass with his vanquisher from that 2022 final, his journey back to competition would have been far less certain.

“I was hitting with Novak (Djokovic) at Wimbledon, and he said to me ‘It doesn’t look like you’ve had surgery’. That for me was the key kind of motivation to say well maybe I’m making some inroads and making some progress into getting back because I didn’t really know,” Kyrgios said.

“If he didn’t say that I don’t know if I’d have been as motivated and kept pushing on the court but that was definitely a big part of the journey when he said that to me.”

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The initial nine months post-surgery were among the most difficult and Kyrgios credits his team for a healthy dose of motivation when his own inevitably ebbed.

Once fit enough again to hold a racquet, his return to court was painfully slow and by no means straightforward – from hitting the soft, fluffy under-10s tennis balls, he built it up every couple of months.

The sport has moved on quickly in his absence. This year’s Roland Garros and Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz is the only one of the current top 10 Kyrgios has not faced, but the Spaniard has notably caught the Australian’s attention as one of his favourites to watch.

“The tennis world right now, it’s definitely the changing of the guard,” Kyrgios He told The Sit-Down podcast in Brisbane. “We’ll understand Rafa and Feds not being there anymore, and I think you could comfortably say it’s the back end of Novak’s career now.

“But now you’ve got the likes of Alcaraz, Holger Rune, Jannik Sinner, these guys that are vying for that next kind of mantle. I’d love to play Jannik Sinner at some stage, hopefully not my first match back … but that would be circled on my calendar for sure and I don’t know, it’s always fun playing (Stefanos) Tsitsipas. I think that’s a very healthy one for the tennis world.”

The physicality of the sport has shifted up a gear too. While able to rely on his fluid, often impossible-to-read serve, blustery aggression and ample array of trick shots in the past, Kyrgios doubled down on variation being key if he stood a chance against the current crop of champions.

He admitted trying to out-rally the likes of Alcaraz and Sinner – beating them at their own game – was “not possible”.

“I think the courts have slowed down everywhere so I think you see more of the all-rounder type of game style now,” he said. “You don’t see the serve-dominant type of game styles anymore…  Look at everyone in the top 10 now, everyone’s a great mover.

“You’ve got Alcaraz, Sinner, Holger Rune, (Alex) de Minaur, these guys move insane, so guys like me who are 6-foot-4, 6-foot-5, I think we kind of have to keep adapting our game and kind of figure out how we’re going to beat these kind of small guys who move like gazelles out there.

“The sport is favouring these guys who are kind of all-rounder type of players that have really no weakness. They’re incredible returners. You look at someone like Sinner, he’s moving end range and knocking the ball as hard as he can. All these courts are kind of playing kind of the same speeds now.”

It had been an agonising and slow ordeal just to return, let alone a standard capable of standing toe-to-toe with the big guns in complete matches.

Though Djokovic had seen enough to suggest he still had what it took, Kyrgios conceded there was a strong chance he would never return to the top level and playing with the confidence he enjoyed during a coming-of-age six-month stretch two years ago, in which he also stunned defending champion Daniil Medvedev en route to the US Open quarterfinals.

“I guess I was okay with the possibility of not playing again, but then I started getting some real improvement at the nine-month mark and it’s been an absolute process the whole thing getting back to a point where I can play pretty much all out,” he said.

“I feel like I’m playing how I was in 2022. I guess we’ll find out.”

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