Medvedev said that Auger-Aliassime was “playing insane” at the start, and that his level was “unreal.” The fact that the Canadian brought that level to a stage like this can be counted as another positive step forward for him. “I did handle them pretty well starting from the third set.” “There were so many tough pressure points, not only the match point itself,” Medvedev said. Medvedev and Auger-Aliassime each won 182 points, but Medvedev won a couple more that mattered. Oh yeah, he also saved a match point, at 4-5 in the fourth, with an unreturnable serve, just moments after double faulting. He saved three break points in the first game of the fifth set, and two more when he served for the match at 5-4 in the fifth. He raised his serving level for the must-win third-set tiebreaker. At 4-4 in the third set, he came back from 0-30 down on his serve. Medvedev did that, and he extricated himself from a lot of tight spots along the way. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna make him work,’” Medvedev said. I was like, ‘What would the best players in the world do?’” “ I was there between the sets, and as I say, zero confidence in myself and the outcome of the match. “Some matches I watched win him the Grand Slams, being two sets to love down with Tsitsipas and Musetti in Roland Garros,” Medvedev said of Djokovic. He had done it just once, against Marin Cilic at Wimbledon last summer two days later, though, he had lost his next five-setter, to Hubert Hurkacz.Īs Medvedev realizes, to make the next leap upward, to the heights currently occupied by Djokovic, he needs to learn to win the wars of attrition, the matches that seem all but lost, when persistence and endurance and belief mean more than shot-making genius. But we hadn’t seen the grit that’s needed to come back from two sets down. So far in his career, Medvedev has shown us his genius, his guile, his speed, his steadiness and his serve, among many other attributes. Medvedev got the boos he likely expected from the Rod Laver audience, but his thought process made sense. When Jim Courier asked the Russian how he came back from a two-set deficit to beat Felix Auger-Aliassime, 6-7 (4), 3-6, 7-6 (2), 7-5, 6-4 in the Australian Open quarterfinals on Wednesday, Medvedev hesitated, warned the crowd that they might not like what he was about to tell them, and said, “I thought, ‘What would Novak do?’” Credit Daniil Medvedev for his honesty-or his knack for stirring things up.
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