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ROD LAVER ARENA — Jack Draper is not a quitter, instinctively.

Anyone who has spent time with him will tell you that Draper is fiercely competitive. He hates the fact he has been forced to shake hands before the end of 16 professional matches.

This one you could see coming after three five-setters in a row, and with his match against the relentlessly physical Carlos Alcaraz starting in the middle of the hottest day of the tournament.

“Maybe it’s a little bit of a ticking time bomb, considering I had no preparation and no work for my body,” Draper said.

“To come here, I think I have really surprised myself with how much I have been able to put myself through.”

Alcaraz wrote on a camera lens after their match: “You will be where you deserve. Get well soon Jack.”

Where exactly “he deserves” is not necessarily clear, but given Draper has already reached a career-high No 15 in the world, won his first two tour-level titles in Stuttgart and Vienna and of course reached a maiden grand slam semi-final at the US Open, all in the last eight months, Alcaraz clearly thinks Draper is a top-10 player in the making.

And he’s right. There is still so much room for improvement. His ranking includes virtually no points outside the hard-court slams, having lost in the first round of the French Open and the second round of Wimbledon. There are two hard-court Masters events in March too, Indian Wells and Miami, where he only won one match across the pair last year.

It means there is a very real chance, depending on when Draper can get back on the match court, that he could make his top-10 debut in the coming months. But he says he will not be rushed back to action, for fear of creating more problems for his body.

“I just want to make right decisions because I don’t want months out,” Draper added.

“There is such short windows in tennis to get your body right. You don’t want to just spike your load so much, and that’s kind of what I have done here, and that’s why I got injured. All tennis injuries or most injuries in sport, unless it’s a freak accident, is all load management.

“If you do too much too soon, if I went and hit a thousand serves tomorrow, I’d probably have an ab strain because I have done so much in one day. Everything is load management.

“Obviously you’re always going to have stress through your body and stuff, but it’s important for me to obviously just get my training load back up again, get this tendonitis or whatever I have going on sorted, so I can be consistent with everything that I’m doing again.”

Disrupted pre-season

Alcaraz knew better than most how little Draper has been able to train over the off-season. He was due to join the Spaniard for a week of training in Alicante, only for tendonitis in his hip to flare up and force him to cancel.

And Alcaraz was not the only player who had to make other plans rather than train with Draper in pre-season: Brazilian teenage sensation Joao Fonseca flew to London to train with him, but had to work with other players at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton because the Brit’s hip had subsequently caused a back problem. At one point last month, Draper couldn’t even walk.

Draper eventually flew to Australia at the end of December but could not start playing points until the week before the Australian Open. His practice set against Novak Djokovic on Rod Laver four days before the tournament started was just about his first proper tennis for a month. He already knew the season’s opening major would be a struggle, and declared himself unavailable for next month’s Davis Cup tie in Japan well in advance.

“I’m incredibly proud of my efforts,” Draper said. “My tennis has been pretty bang-average. The whole week it’s been really poor actually but it’s been my competitiveness, my fight, and my desire to win that’s got me into the last 16 of a grand slam, which is something I’m very proud of.”

Progress is being made

Two years ago, Draper described himself as “a work in progress” after losing to Rafael Nadal on this same court.

On that occasion, he gave a good account of his tennis, claiming the second set off the Spaniard, but had been cramping as early as the third and while he completed the match, it wasn’t much of a contest by the end.

Nadal showed little mercy on that occasion and Alcaraz was similarly ruthless, for all his kind words and genuine affection for his opponent. The No 3 seed had both feet inside the baseline every time Draper had to hit a second serve and did not hesitate to hit his famous drop shot as often as possible.

Draper battled manfully, even breaking back in the first set, but it was clear even from the fourth game that he was unlikely to finish the match. The opportunities afforded by a flurry of errors, not an uncommon occurrence with Alcaraz’s hyper-aggressive gamestyle, he was just about fit enough to take but it was “vamos” not “come on” that was roared from the end of the court after 57 minutes. Alcaraz had the opening set, and the second was much more one-sided as Draper eventually found himself unable to recover into the middle of the court.

But British tennis fans should take heart. Plenty will have woken up to the news that Draper had retired injured from the match and said words to the effect of “always injured, he’ll never amount to anything”, but that does not take into account all of the evidence.

“I want to have a good, consistent year. I have been on a good run in the last 18 months, been relatively injury-free, and that’s allowed me to play the tennis I want to play and play well in these big tournaments,” Draper said.

“I don’t want to get myself in a position where I’m playing through pain and playing through injury.

“I want to be able to show up to these events and give it my best shot and have the right preparation I need.”