Daniil Medvedev gets rid of the Dutch disease

At the ABN AMRO Open, a 500 category tournament of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) with a prize fund of €2.2 million, Daniil Medvedev is performing successfully. Having beaten the Dutchman Botik van de Zandshulp in two games, he reached the 1/4 finals of this competition for the first time since 2019, where he will now meet with his last year’s champion, Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime. Winning the title in Rotterdam guarantees the Russian a return to the top ten in the world rankings.

For Daniil Medvedev, ABN AMRO Open became the first tournament after defeat in the third round of the Australian Open, which pushed him out of the top 10 in the world classification for the first time since July 2019. Now the task of returning there is on the agenda, and just now the favorable period has come for its solution. The fact is that before the beginning of April, Medvedev needs to defend not a very large number of rating points. It is no coincidence that the Russian tennis player has noticeably adjusted his schedule. If in February last year he played only one tournament of the 500 category in Acapulco, Mexico, now he decided to play three weeks in a row. His February voyage began in Rotterdam, and will continue in Doha at the Qatar ExxonMobil Open (category 250) and in the UAE at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships (category 500).

The ex-first racket of the world has not had such a rich playing practice during this period for six years.

From the point of view of statistics, the Rotterdam tournament cannot be called successful for Medvedev. Having played the quarter-finals there in 2018 and the semi-finals in 2019, he then suffered defeats in the first rounds twice in a row. And now, at the start of the ABN AMRO Open, Medvedev had a hard time: Spaniard Alejandro Davidovich Fokina took the first set from him on Tuesday. But then everything fell into place. The opponent lost his vigilance a little, but the Russian adapted to the surface, caught the right point of impact and managed to turn the tide of the fight. And the meeting of the second round with the representative of the Netherlands Botik van de Zandshulp on Thursday was already much easier. The opponent has never been able to take Medvedev’s serve, who proved his advantage in less than an hour and a half – 6:2, 6:2.

The fourth consecutive victory over the leader of the Dutch men’s tennis, which occupies the 35th place in the world ranking, brought Medvedev to the 1/4 finals of the eighth racket of the world, Felix Auger-Aliassime, whom he had already beaten four times. However, it will be much more difficult to extend this series, as the Canadian surpasses the Dutchman in all respects. Auger-Aliassime has been in the top ten almost constantly for more than a year, and has been performing very confidently under the roof lately. Suffice it to say that he won his first ATP title 12 months ago in Rotterdam, and last fall, fighting for getting into the final tournament of the year in Turin, Auger-Aliassime managed to win in Florence, Antwerp and Basel, giving out an unbeaten streak of 16 matches.

In general, Friday’s quarter-final looks like a meeting of equal opponents.

But no matter how it ends, it will be too early to talk about Medvedev’s return to the top ten. Surely this will happen only if he wins the current tournament, in which several strong opponents continue to play. In particular, the most experienced Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov and Australian Alex De Minor, who knocked Andrei Rublev out of the fight in the first round, will play for the second ticket to the semi-finals from the bottom half of the grid.

Evgeny Fedyakov