US Open: Hewett and Reid fight back into wheelchair doubles final after Reid's singles rout by Oda

Gordon Reid left the court with 1-6, 0-6 on the scoreboard. His men's wheelchair singles quarter-final lasted barely an hour, and it ended in the way no player wants to remember. Four hours later, the same man, in the same grounds, stood at the baseline for the deciding tie-break of the men's wheelchair doubles semi-final alongside Alfie Hewett, and won it 10-7. One day. Two scorelines at opposite ends of a spectrum that only someone who has competed in a Grand Slam wheelchair main draw fully understands: on one side, the emptiness of a defeat with no excuse attached; on the other, the tension of a ten-point shootout in which every rally can overturn an entire week. I rewatched both matches on the same evening. What is worth writing about is not the scoreline. A SCHEDULE COMPRESSED BEYOND REASON The wheelchair events at the US Open carry a feature television audiences rarely notice: the schedule is compressed. The men's singles quarter-finals and the men's doubles semi-finals can fall on the same day, on different courts, a few hours apart. A player walks on at 11 in the morning for a singles match and returns at 4 in the afternoon for a doubles match. In the able-bodied draw, nobody has to do that. In the wheelchair draw, it is routine. Players enter both singles and doubles, because there are few tournaments in the year, because ranking points come from both, and because a place in a Grand Slam main draw is not something you decline. The two-bounce rule is the most cited feature of this sport and also the most misunderstood. The ball may bounce twice before the player returns it. That does not make the tennis slower. It changes the geometry of the court. The receiver is not obliged to take the ball on the first bounce. They can sit deeper, wait for the ball to drop low, and strike from a more balanced position. A fast serve does not end the point; it merely opens a rally in which the receiver holds more positional options. The consequence follows: the serving advantage in wheelchair tennis is markedly lower than in standing tennis. And when the serving advantage is low, the ten-point tie-break becomes the most dangerous zone in the match. That is the technical background needed to read the men's doubles semi-final. Hewett and Reid faced Gustavo Fernandez of Argentina and Tokito Oda of Japan, the very pair that beat them in last year's final. They lost the first set 4-6, won the second 6-3, and took the match tie-break 10-7. Earlier the same day, in singles, Reid lost 6-1, 6-0 to Oda in the quarter-finals. Oda is the top seed and the defending champion. Hewett, the second seed, beat Casey Ratzlaff of the United States 6-2, 6-0 to reach the semi-finals. Hewett is 28 and has won four singles titles in New York, most recently in 2026. Hewett and Reid are chasing their sixth US Open men's doubles title as a partnership, after five in a row between 2026 and 2026. In the quad doubles, Andy Lapthorne of Great Britain and Leon Els of South Africa lost 4-6, 6-3, 10-8 to second seeds Sam Schroder of the Netherlands and Jin Woodman of Australia. That is a different match by nature: quad doubles brings together four players with differing levels of impairment across all four limbs, which means each player carries an individual range limit, and tactics must be built around that limit rather than around a single player's strengths. The men's doubles final will be against Martin de la Puente of Spain and Ruben Spaargaren of the Netherlands. That is the full set of facts. The rest is how you read them. WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED BETWEEN SET ONE AND SET TWO Based on my experience tracking matches, I keep the habit of logging every rally of wheelchair doubles matches into a personal chart divided into four phases: serve, return, the first ball after the ball goes live, and the finishing ball. In this match, the clearest shift came in the second phase. In the first set, Hewett and Reid returned from deep, driving the ball cross-court. That is the default choice for most teams, and it carries a fatal weakness: a cross-court return lands directly in the operating zone of the opposing net player. Fernandez and Oda read it quickly. Their net player barely had to move; he simply waited for the ball and finished the point on the first contact. In the second set, the return direction changed. More balls down the line, and more importantly, more lobs. The lob carries a different value in wheelchair tennis than in standing tennis. It is not merely defensive. It forces the net player to turn the chair, retreat, and lose position. A 180-degree chair turn costs time and push; after that turn, the player is no longer in place to start the next attacking sequence. For a team that plays through its net player cutting off balls, being forced into three or four chair turns in a set is a form of cumulative wear. In the second set I counted a markedly higher use of the lob than in the first, and the British pair's points-won rate on those rallies exceeded their overall points-won rate. That is the signature of a deliberate adjustment, not of luck. But there is a deeper layer, and that layer decided the outcome. In wheelchair tennis, a player cannot use the legs to generate rotation. Rotation comes from the shoulders, the hips, and the way the chair is set. That means every stroke is the end of a sequence: push, brake, shift the centre of gravity, and only then swing. That sequence takes time. Therefore the most dangerous shot in this sport is not the hardest one, but the one that forces the opponent to run that sequence while off balance. That is precisely what Hewett and Reid did from the second set onwards. They did not increase ball speed. They increased the number of times the opponent had to move before striking. And in the tie-break, everything compacts. Ten points, win by two. A mini-break is worth roughly twice an ordinary break, because it adds directly to the point count rather than to the game count. At 10-7, the shootout ran 17 points, and across those 17 points there is no set left in which to correct a mistake. In the tie-break I noticed a small but telling detail: after losing the first point, Hewett and Reid switched their return order in the receiving formation. That is the kind of adjustment no statistical sheet records, and the kind only a pair who have played together for more than a decade would dare to make in the middle of a Grand Slam semi-final tie-break. In other words: experience is not about playing better. It is about knowing what to change, and changing it immediately. Hewett and Reid were pioneers in turning wheelchair doubles into a discipline with its own tactical grammar, rather than a scaled-down copy of able-bodied men's doubles. ACROSS THE NET: ODA AND THE GENERATIONAL SHIFT The men's singles quarter-final between Reid and Oda finished 1-6, 0-6. That scoreline says a great deal, but less than people usually assume. Oda is the top seed and the defending champion. His game reflects a generation of wheelchair players who grew up with data and with specialist training centres. Players of the previous generation, Reid among them, tended to build their game around ball control and timing; the new generation builds it around imposing tempo from the very first serve. The 1-6, 0-6 gap is not a gap in basic technique. It is a gap in decision speed. Reid still struck the right shot and still found the right target, but he had a fraction of a second to do it, and at this stage of a career a fraction of a second is everything. What stands out is that Reid walked onto the doubles court four hours later and played at an entirely different level. In the tracking sheet I maintain for individual players, the most telling figure was not points won but the first-serve percentage in the second set and the tie-break compared with the morning singles. The gap was substantial. There are two explanations. The first: a quick singles defeat was effectively a session to read the court and the wind conditions, and Reid used it exactly that way. The second: his competitive motivation in the doubles was higher, because that is where a title was available. I lean strongly toward the second, and that points to a structural issue in this sport: when a player is placed in a position where they must choose between two events on the same day, they always choose the event they can win. THE CONTRARIAN VIEW: COMEBACK IS THE WRONG WORD The conventional telling of this semi-final will be: Hewett and Reid lost the first set, then came back, avenging last year's final defeat. That is a tidy story, and it conceals what matters more. The two teams played three sets. At no moment was either side comprehensively outplayed tactically. In the first set Fernandez and Oda won 6-4, which is one break. In the second, Hewett and Reid won 6-3, also one break. The difference between winning and losing a Grand Slam wheelchair doubles match sits in two or three rallies. The word comeback implies that a weaker side rose above itself. In reality the two teams were level, and one of them adjusted faster in exactly two areas: return direction, and the use of the lob to break the net player's position. There is a further temptation in this kind of storytelling: turning it into a tale of revenge. I have made that mistake more than once, and I know why. In 2026, after the World Cup final in Russia, I analysed Croatia's defence and forgot that an entire country was celebrating. The broadcaster received 78 complaints, and the producer told me something I still remember: tell the story, do not just read the numbers. That communications failure in 2026 taught me a lesson: data needs a heart to become a story. But that lesson has a reverse side. When you turn everything into an emotional story, you begin to attach meanings to data that the data does not carry. Revenge is one of those meanings. A pair does not win because they want revenge. They win because they find a zone in which to return the ball differently. Wheelchair tennis and standing tennis share one sporting house, and differ only in how they read space. The problem is that most people writing about it are still reading it with the grammar of another sport. A QUESTION ABOUT THE ECOSYSTEM There is one thing I have tracked for a long time and still find true: a closed ecosystem produces stars, but it does not produce depth. For years, the wheelchair events at the Grand Slams revolved around a small group of players. The same names appeared in semi-finals and finals, week after week. That generated impressive statistics, and those statistics were then used to prove the dominance of a few individuals. But the four men's singles semi-final places at this US Open belong to three nations: Great Britain with two players, Japan and the United States. In the men's doubles, five nations featured across the last two rounds: Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Argentina and Japan. The quad doubles draw featured the Netherlands, Australia, Great Britain and South Africa. That is the sign of an ecosystem opening up. And when an ecosystem opens, the value of the old numbers changes. Five consecutive titles from 2026 to 2026 for Hewett and Reid does not shrink because there are now more rivals. But it has to be read against a different competitive baseline. This is also why I dislike using Grand Slam title counts as the single measure of greatness. In a draw with eight players capable of winning, winning four times says one thing. In a draw with twenty players capable of winning, winning four times says something quite different. Nobody can say today's star is greater than the star of ten years ago, because they never competed against each other on the same baseline. THE FINAL: THE OPPONENTS FEW NOTICE Martin de la Puente of Spain and Ruben Spaargaren of the Netherlands will face Hewett and Reid in the final. This pair does not receive the attention a multiple champion pair receives. They do not have five consecutive titles. They do not have a revenge narrative. They are not names television viewers recognise instantly. From the stands, I have learned that the biggest trend always wears the most modest shirt. The pairs who shift the landscape of an event usually come from countries with no prior tradition in it, and they arrive without the weight of history. De la Puente comes from a tennis nation with a serious tradition of physical preparation, where specialist conditioning work for wheelchair players was built into national programmes relatively early. Spaargaren belongs to a Dutch school long renowned in this sport, and that school has one defining trait: it teaches players to keep the ball in play before it teaches them to finish the point. For Hewett and Reid, this will be a tactically different match from the semi-final. Fernandez and Oda play by imposing tempo. De la Puente and Spaargaren play by keeping the ball alive and waiting for the error. A pair who want to end points quickly will meet a pair who want to extend them. And in a match where the serving advantage is diluted by the two-bounce rule, extending rallies is a far more rational strategy than hunting the decisive shot. If de la Puente and Spaargaren read that correctly, the final will not resemble the semi-final. WHAT REMAINS AFTER THIS WEEK Gordon Reid lost 1-6, 0-6 in a singles quarter-final, and four hours later he was in a doubles final. Alfie Hewett won 6-2, 6-0 in his singles quarter-final and is still chasing a fifth singles title in New York. Andy Lapthorne lost in the quad doubles. All of it inside a few days, in the same grounds. No other event at a Grand Slam asks a player to switch between two competitive states on the same day, with two different sets of opponents, two different tactics and two different psychological frames. And there is a question Grand Slam organisers will have to answer within a few years: as the wheelchair draws deepen in quality, how long can the compressed schedule survive? Because a tournament with real depth cannot operate on the calendar of a tournament with only eight players. On finals night, out on court, nobody will be thinking about that. But the person writing about it has to.