Tsitsipas: A player’s destiny involves more misery than gloryOn Sunday, Stefanos Tsitsipas was competing in Melbourne.By ATP Employees
Defeated but not defeated, Stefanos Tsitsipas said after losing to Taylor Fritz in the fourth round of the Australian Open on Sunday that he is considering the wider picture.
If Alex de Minaur defeats Andrei Rublev on Sunday night, the Greek, who was not at his best in his four-set loss to the American, would fall out of the Top 10 in the Pepperstone ATP Rankings for the first time since February 2019.
It’s not a bad sensation. Speaking at his press conference after the game, Tsitsipas described it as a feeling of perpetual progression and transformation. There is always going to be change.
You must continue working and allowing yourself to grow from these experiences if you find yourself in the Top 10 one day and out of it the next. Give it another go, time and time again, and allow yourself to sort of seek out all these moments that have been working for you over the last five years.
There aren’t many great moments, and it hurts. Simply put, there are far more difficult and terrible times in your career—painting, suffering, and all that—than there are triumphant and successful times. These represent a very small portion of the year-round lives of tennis players.
Fritz achieved his first Top 10 victory at a major after hitting 13 aces and winning 86 percent of his first-serve points. Fritz’s strong serve and forehand helped to shorten the points, frustrating Tsitsipas, who made it to the final in Melbourne the previous year, by not forcing the American into long rallies.
All I want is to organize, make arguments, and sort of figure out through demonstrations and conversations what works best for me. Something confused me a little bit. It was just a serve or a spectacular return, so there wasn’t much for me to mentally prepare for and visualize during the match. That kind of contest was it.
Instead of simply sort of defending my way through rallies, I wish I could figure out a way to get more involved in them and kind of shift the flow by winning rallies.
Tsitsipas has now dropped his last five games against opponents ranked in the top 20. His season record is 4-2 when he departs Australia.
Tsitsipas was unable to get past the quarterfinals in tour-level competitions held in Miami, Indian Wells, and Rotterdam last year. In the upcoming months, he will have a chance to move up the Pepperstone ATP Rankings since he will have fewer points to defend.
