ATP Tour
Salisbury & Skupski: ‘A bit of revenge is hopefully around the corner’
Britons face Granollers/Zeballos for US Open title
September 05, 2025
Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Joe Salisbury and Neal Skupski are competing together as a full-time team for the first time this season.
By Andrew Eichenholz
Earlier this year Joe Salisbury and Neal Skupski came close to winning their first major title as a team. In the Roland Garros final against Marcel Granollers and Horacio Zeballos, the Britons rallied from a first-set bagel to push deep into a deciding set against the longtime partners, only to fall just short of Paris glory.
“We were very close. It was a bit of a strange match. We got killed in the first set. Could have easily run away from us. I think we managed to stick in in the second set and turn it around,” Salisbury said. “It was a very, very tight third set as well. And I think we came off the court, it was obviously gutting to lose the final, but we were proud of how we fought and I think we did everything we could, sometimes it just doesn’t go your way.”
Now, Salisbury and Skupski, who are competing this season as a full-time team for the first time, have a chance at revenge. The sixth seeds will take on Granollers and Zeballos once more for the trophy at the season’s final major.
“[The] past few months we’ve had a great run, we’ve had a lot of good results, but we’ve yet to get over the line and get a title this year, so obviously that’s an extra motivation,” Salisbury said. “Whatever happens on Saturday, it has still been a very good tournament for us. But we really want to get over that line and get that title, get that Grand Slam together.”
The Britons have been a model of consistency in recent months, reaching the final in Toronto as well as semi-finals in Cincinnati, Washington, Eastbourne and Winston-Salem in addition to a quarter-final appearance at Wimbledon.
It is only one year ago that Salisbury and Skupski agreed to their partnership to begin with. Immediately after the US Open, they agreed over text to team up for 2025 and then notified their partners immediately to allow those players an opportunity to find a new partner for the season ahead.
It was a long time coming for Salisbury and Skupski, who have flown the flag for British doubles for years. They did not know one another when they were younger because 35-year-old Skupski is a couple years older than 33-year-old Salisbury. The college products — Salisbury went to the University of Memphis and Skupski attended Louisiana State University — first got to know one another more than a decade ago.
In 2013, Skupski watched Salisbury play Albano Olivetti in an ITF World Tennis Tour event held in Great Britain.
“I remember watching Joe play there and I thought he was pretty good. He was a little bit different, I’m pretty sure he was serve-volleying and stuff like that on the grass,” Skupski said. “But never really thought, ‘Oh, in the future we’ll play doubles together’, because I was with [brother] Ken [Skupski] at the time.”
Salisbury added: “I remember we played against each other quite a few times on the Challenger Tour when Neal was playing with Ken and I was playing with my now coach David O’Hare.
“We played quite a few matches against each other, so I feel like we got to know each other when we were playing Challengers.”
For a time, Salisbury worked with coach Tom Corrie, who spoke to Skupski. “Tom was like, ‘Ah, you should play with Joe in the future’,” Skupski recalled. “I was like, ‘Ah, okay, yeah, yeah’. And then obviously I probably should have played with Joe a little bit sooner.”
They turned into frequent opponents. Salisbury enjoyed extended success with American Rajeev Ram, winning three consecutive US Open titles from 2021-2023. In the 2022 final, Ram and Salisbury defeated Skupski and Wesley Koolhof in the final.
“It was quite a difficult match when we played against each other a few years ago. Obviously Joe won, so he probably felt like he played well, but I didn’t feel like we both showed our full potential,” Skupski said. “But now we’re on the same time together, we’ve got no Brits on the other side. We can really go after whoever we play against.”
Salisbury explained that him and Skupski had wanted to play together for a long time, but the timing never worked. He had been succeeding with Ram, or Skupski was playing well with his partner.
“But I think we knew that it was something we wanted to do at some point,” Salisbury said. “It was just waiting for the timing to be right.”
Now they are once again just one victory from lifting a major trophy together and becoming the first all-British duo to win the US Open in the Open Era. Skupski said: “A bit of revenge is hopefully around the corner.”
