Taylor Fritz erlebte bei seinem Debüt beim Masters-1000-Turnier in Cincinnati gegen seinen Landsmann Alex Michelsen alles andere als einen ruhigen Auftakt.
Das klare Ergebnis von 6:3, 6:4 lässt die turbulenten Momente auf dem Court kaum erahnen. Vor allem zu Beginn der Partie musste die Nummer sechs der Setzliste einige schwierige Situationen überstehen.
Der 26-Jährige aus San Diego warf seinen Schläger nach dem Ende des ersten Spiels, das er bei eigenem Aufschlag verlor, zu Boden und zertrümmerte ihn. Im anschließenden On-Court-Interview mit den Mikrofonen der ATP Tour, das auf den Kanälen von Tennis TV ausgestrahlt wurde, erklärte der US-Amerikaner den Ausraster: "If I can't serve, my serve stops being one of my best weapons. I came out on the side where the wind was helping me, I clearly should have held the serve, and I only scored a first, on which he responded with a winner. Then I double-faulted and had to play the rest of the points with the second one. It frustrated me a lot and it all blew up in the first game," verriet Fritz.
Fritz fand schnell zurück
Der Wutausbruch erwies sich für Fritz jedoch als hilfreich. Unmittelbar danach korrigierte er die Fehler aus dem Auftaktspiel: "Sometimes you just have to explode and let off steam, this helped me to move forward. I think that, if I had tried to keep everything inside, maybe I wouldn't have been able to turn the situation around so quickly".
Nach Ansicht des US-Amerikaners gibt es bei diesem Turnier in Ohio einen weiteren Gegner, den es zu beachten gilt: den Wind. "At times it was very strong, and it wasn't a constant wind that you could adapt to. There were bursts, so sometimes you didn't know how much he would deflect the ball. Sometimes I just hit her and she came out, other times I hit her hard and she didn't come out the same way. It was really hard to serve. I think this was reflected in the service statistics of both during the first set.
Towards the end the conditions were much more manageable, which was good. Once I got the break lead in the second, I really wanted the wind to calm down so I could just focus on holding the serve. It was a very tough match," sagte Fritz abschließend.