National Bank Omnium | Defeated, Tsitsipás heavily criticizes his father

You’ve probably heard that you have to leave your family problems at home to perform at work. For Stefanos Tsitsipás, this is clearly harder to do than to say.

Tsitsipás, seeded eighth, was surprised at the start of the National Bank Open by Japan’s Kei Nishikori in two sets of 6-4 and 6-4. He did not hesitate to criticize his coach – in this case his father – to explain his setbacks.

The Greek has found that his shots have been lacking bite for about five days. This is partly due to a change in the strings on his racket. During a practice session on Thursday, he had a heated confrontation with his father Apostolos on the subject.

“I think the minimum I need is a coach who listens to my feedback and tries to adjust to my needs. In that sense, my father was neither very intelligent nor good at negotiating with his situations nor good at reading what’s happening on the court,” the player lambasted in a press briefing.

After this resounding outing, Stefanos Tsitsipás does not know if he wants to keep his father’s services.

“It’s a really bad performance and it’s not the first time he’s done that. I’m really disappointed in him,” Tsitsipás said.

On paper, Tsitsipás played a very good match. He hit nine aces, converted 72% of his first serve attempts, and hit nine winners. However, he was unable to respond to the more defensive balls that Kei Nishikori served him. That was what made the difference.

“My balls were pretty dead. I’m a player who takes advantage of big shots, the weight of my shots, I wasn’t able to do that today,” he analyzed.

In his career, Kei Nishikori has won two of his three duels against Stefanos Tsitsipás.

Medvedev also out from the start

Less than an hour later on the central court, it was the turn of the Russian Daniil Medvedev, third seed, to be shown the exit door, in three sets of 6-4, 1-6, 6-2 against the Spaniard Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, ranked 42.^e in the world, in 1 hour 55 minutes.

Before this match, Davidovich Fokina had never beaten Medvedev in four meetings, three of which were played on hard surfaces. On Thursday, he recovered from being dominated in the second set, and after a toilet break of about 15 minutes after that second set, to escape with the match thanks to breaks in the first and fifth games of the deciding set.