“Outside of this, I don’t think someone should be able to tell you what to do”: Fritz defends Laver Cup coaching and rejects it everywhere else
Coached from the bench by Andre Agassi all weekend, and beaten by a Carlos Alcaraz who credited Casper Ruud’s mid-match advice for the win, Taylor Fritz still refuses to see the Laver Cup as an argument for on-court coaching on tour: “Tennis is an individual sport. Outside of this, I don’t think someone should be able to tell you what to do.”
Taylor Fritz, Laver Cup 2026 | © Getty Images / Laver Cup
Taylor Fritz spent three days at the O2 being talked to between points by Andre Agassi and Patrick Rafter, and he left London arguing that what happened on his bench should stay there.
The Laver Cup, won 13-5 by Team Europe on Sunday, is one of the few events where captains and team-mates coach openly from courtside, and the weekend produced a vivid example of it: Carlos Alcaraz, who beat Fritz 6-3, 4-6, 13-11 on Saturday night, said afterwards that Casper Ruud had walked to the bench mid-match to tell him he was overplaying, and credited that intervention with turning the match.
Put to him that he had been critical of coaching when it was allowed more widely on tour this year, and asked whether this weekend was an advert for extending it, Fritz drew a hard line between the two cases.
Sports that are teams makes sense. Tennis is an individual sport.
“No. Laver Cup is a team competition. That’s all there is to it,” the American said. “I have never been against coaching in a team competition. Sports that are teams makes sense. Tennis is an individual sport. So outside of this and outside of any other team competitions, I don’t think someone should be able to tell you what to do.”
It is a distinction both captains have described from the other side of the chair without ever calling it instruction. Agassi has said the job is not to direct world-class players but to avoid getting in their way, that a captain “can’t parachute in and make magic” and that what he can do is “not screw them up”. Yannick Noah, Europe’s captain, put it in terms of temperature rather than tactics: “It’s not pretty much what I say. It’s pretty much what they feel, if I can be useful. I try to go with their energy.”
Fritz’s own week gave him little to soften the argument with. He lost the Friday doubles alongside Alexander Bublik, lost to Alcaraz in the match that swung the weekend, and lost Sunday’s opening doubles with Alex de Minaur to Flavio Cobolli and Jakub Mensik, the result that put Europe within one match of the trophy.
“I don’t take too many positives out of it. I contributed zero point,” he said. “I had a good match yesterday, but at the end I still lost, and that’s all that really matters at the end of the day, if you win or lose. It is what it is, and I’m just motivated to come back and do better next year in L.A.”
He was equally unsentimental about the conditions, refusing the easy explanation of a hostile crowd. “I don’t think the crowd was that tough. I thought the crowd was pretty fair. It’s more just being the away team,” he said. “They get to pick matchups on Day 3, so being in a position where going into Day 3 we need to win three out of the four matches when they get to pick the matches, it’s just a tough ask.”
