Stefanos Tsitsipas and Daniil Medvedev will battle against each other for the 14th time as part of the last 16 of the Shanghai Masters. With this, Tsitsipas admitted that he has more respect for his opponent now, compared to what he perceived before.
Ever since their ill-tempered match at the 2018 Miami Open, the two athletes have had a number of heated encounters. They have battled against each other 12 more times, including twice in the semi-finals of the Australian Open. Tsitsipas now claims that after all this, their relationship has improved.
The athlete admitted: “I consider him someone that I respect on the tour, much more than I did before… We’ve had some heated things on the court in the past, but I think those things have resolved themselves over time, and, obviously, we also had the time to speak about those things and have a common understanding of why these things happen.”
He added: “I always want to resolve things like that, I don’t want to leave them. It took a while, obviously, a pretty long time, but it’s good to kind of get it out of the way, and making sure our tennis brings peace instead of a war… It’s a war zone when you’re out there on the court trying to, obviously, fight your best and try to get the win, but I feel like tennis should unite instead of separate.”
A boring opponent
Five years ago, Tsitsipas fuelled the animosity by calling Medvedev’s style of play “boring”. But now, he seemed to have more appreciation for his opponent.
He said: “I think there are a lot of perhaps things that he has brought into the game that are, I would consider, quite unorthodox, because you haven’t seen a lot of players in the past, you know, play the way that he does… Which is, in fact, after thinking about it, in the past I might have said some mean stuff about his game, but after actually thinking about those things, I think I was completely wrong in that.”
He added: “There’s a lot of interesting things in his game that he brings that are very different from other players… I think that’s what makes him unique as a player, because you don’t see players like him very often, and it gives tennis another dimension in terms of how it can be played and how differently it can be crafted.”
When Medvedev was asked about his relationship with other athletes, he declared: “Sometimes we had some fights. Sometimes someone said something in the press conference. And it’s okay. In one month, we don’t remember it too much. We still rivals…But people tend to exaggerate it. Oh my God, they hate each other. It’s such a crazy thing. No, it’s okay, we respect each other. Here I think we support each other like never before, and it’s a funny feeling.”
Source: Eurosport