It’s at the stage where, if I want to be in the top five in the world, I need to work had. “So I feel it’s actually gotten stricter”.
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Meanwhile Maria Sharapova and Lucie Safarova both advanced to the fourth round of Wimbledon on Friday as well.
Asked about the lack of characters, he said: “I like to watch entertaining tennis”. “That’s just how it is”.
It was his third match at Wimbledon in five days, and the third time Nick Kyrgios had attracted the attention of the umpire for the wrong reasons.
“I knew I had the game to make some results on grass that I didn’t in the past”.
And tennis’s great entertainer plans to do it his way. “Once you miss those opportunities, it’s really tough to come back”.
Only in the late going, leading two sets to one, did Kyrgios knock off the larking and tomfoolery, as grim in expression as Raonic had been from start to finish. Then he closed out the set with three straight aces of his own. “Serve well and play aggressive. Reminds me of 35 years ago”, McEnroe told the BBC after watching Kyrgios’s breathtaking four-set second-round triumph over world No. 8 Milos Raonic.
The match turned in Kyrgios’ favor when he broke for a 6-5 lead in the second set.
At the business end of the fourth, the pressure was really on Raonic when he served at 4-3 down. “It was a big thing for everybody”, he said.
“I would be in favour of loosening it up a little bit”. Gasquet hasn’t surpassed the fourth round of a grand slam since the 2013 USA Open.
The difference between the two, you suspect, is that Kyrgios is possessed by a rage to conquer: Raonic just thinks it would be rather nice to win a title. “I wanted this tournament to last longer, but it is what it is”.
You couldn’t exactly call it gamesmanship, but the way Kyrgios imposed his big personality on the match certainly appeared to influence the outcome. I managed to get a lot of returns back in play. “If it was to go into a fifth, I would have still felt confident”. He’s a magician from back there.
The victory was the first time the youngster had beaten his Canadian opponent in their previous two encounters and it also helped avenge the quarter-final defeat he suffered at the hands of the same player in 2014. I’m not going to change anything.
Ivo Karlovic rode his hard serve into the second week of Wimbledon, beating Jo-Wilfried Tsonga despite not earning a single break against the Frenchman.
Still, over the next three hours the Australian worked through his full repertoire of laughs, curses, shouts, poses and racket tosses, as well as, better yet, astonishing serves, through-the-legs shots and raging forehand winners.
Verdasco’s big left-handed game certainly had the potential to disrupt Wawrinka, for the Spaniard’s main weapon, his flat deep forehand, countered Wawrinka’s famed backhand, and especially down the line.
“She couldn’t play better”, Mouratoglou said about Watson. “And for sure because it was his first match he won against a good player”.
The most recent meeting was in the 2012 Indian Wells Masters, a match Djokovic won in straight sets.
“It was a good match against Marcos”, he told the press. I really don’t know. Asked if she was any good at the Italian game, Sharapova responded: “Terrible”.
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Kevin Anderson’s haul of 79 aces so far places him third on the list and the South African will need to significantly bolster that total to trouble defending champion Novak Djokovic on Court One, where their match follows the tussle between Switzerland’s French Open victor Stan Wawrinka and Belgian David Goffin.
