Twenty-two-year-old German Alexander “Sascha” Zverev suggested all his youthful rivals to discard on-court antics and instead let their respective “rackets talk for them.” He urged that the next-gen pretenders of tennis abandon their gamesmanship and theatrics somewhat ironically right after Zverev incurred a penalty point for admitting his loss at the US Open.
Why Zverev is not happy with the behavior of Medvedev and Tsitsipas?
The German specifically picked on Daniil Medvedev who raved in as the tournament’s villain when the Russian fifth seed thanked the hostile crowd of the Louis Armstrong stadium for propelling him towards victory. Medvedev had enraged the crowd by saying that he is feeding on their booing, and the audience not rooting for him has only energized him even more.
In an interview, the German said: “Medvedev is obviously going over the line a little bit now. But he’s winning. He’s in the quarter-finals. At the end of the day, it all doesn’t matter if you’re winning.
However, he further added saying: “But, yeah, I hope some of the NextGen or the young guys’ will learn from the older guys like Roger and Rafa who have been unbelievable over their career, really let their racquet talk for them, not try to distract opponents.”
Sascha also lambasted rising Greek star Stefanos Tsitsipas, who berated many of his colleagues and the match umpire Damien Dumusois following an exit from the US Open’s first round.
Zverev brought up recurring mishaps of Tsitsipas’s shoelaces, which according to the German tennis star, are not only comical but irritating distractions which repeatedly surfaced during Stefanos’s Washington ATP’s final run, last month.
The German expressing his disapproval said: “I think a lot of the times Tsitsipas gets over the line with changing his shoes 15 times in a tournament, going to the bathroom in the middle of a set. Stuff like that.”
He later added: “Let your tennis racquet talk for your kind of. You don’t need to do things to distract the opponent, try to win that way.”
Alexander had a lot to say about “major offences” committed by Nick Kyrgios and an almost endless bathroom break taken by twenty-one-year-old Frances Tiafoe, during matches.
In the post-match interview, after a four-set defeat from Diego Schwartzman, Zverev said: “There’s a lot of young guys that do things on the tennis court that maybe is not the best thing to do. I don’t want the next generation to be known for that.”
Assessing everything we can only hope that the NextGen of tennis take cues from all that the long-touted future Grand Slam Champion has to say.
