Daniil Medvedev switched to win-win mode – Sport – Kommersant

Daniil Medvedev became the winner of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, which ended in the United Arab Emirates (ATP) 500 category major tournament with a prize fund of $2.8 million, who confidently outplayed Andrei Rublev in two games and became the first Russian tennis player in history to win three titles in three weeks. This allowed Medvedev to rise to sixth place in the world ranking, ahead of Rublev, and regain the title of the first racket of Russia.

“Thanks for the ending, guys!” – came in Russian from the stands of the Dubai tennis stadium a minute before the end of the match, in which for the sixth time in the history of the APR, the title was contested by two Russians. Five previous such finals have been played for a very long time, and in the last of them, at the Kremlin Cup in 2008, Igor Kunitsyn sensationally broke the resistance of Marat Safin. However, in this case there were no surprises. The victory of Daniil Medvedev, the obvious favorite of this meeting, of course, was not a revelation. But the speed with which he achieved the desired result for himself was impressive. “Daniel just destroyed me today. I don’t know how he does it,” said Andrei Rublev, losing with a score of 2:6, 2:6 in 1 hour and 8 minutes. In turn, Medvedev wrote “Not over yet” on a television camera, which means “Nothing over yet” in English.

Of course, there are no eternal winning streaks, and Medvedev’s current non-stop will also someday end. But 14 matches won in less than three weeks in Rotterdam, Doha and Dubai is a great number. Moreover, Novak Djokovic is on the list of losers to the Russian, who actually lost to him without options on Friday in the semifinals.

Rublev for his performance in Dubai, of course, also deserves the kindest words. His feat in the second round meeting against the Spaniard Alejandro Davidovich-Fokina, during which the Russian managed to win back five match points, became one of the most striking episodes of the tournament. The victory over Alexander Zverev, an opponent whom Rublev had not been able to beat at the ATP tournaments, was also very valuable. But in order to defeat Medvedev, Rublev needed to act almost perfectly: serve from the first ball and operate accurately on the back line, trying to delay the game as much as possible at the reception. Considering the significance of the match and the level of tennis that the opponent demonstrated, this was almost unrealistic. The quintessence of what will then happen on the court for a little over an hour was the very first game in which Medvedev immediately took someone else’s serve. In total, he did this four times, while Rublev, despite fairly frequent exits to the net, did not earn a single break point, pulling out only eight points at the reception for the entire match.

Kommersant asked last year’s Dubai champion if it matters to him that Medvedev has now surpassed him again in the rankings and regained the title of Russia’s first racket. “But for me, Daniil always remained number one in the country,” Rublev said. “His results were objectively better than mine. I understand perfectly well that I came out ahead only because he failed to confirm last year’s points at the Australian Open. I didn’t find out about it right away, but by accident.”

“For me, this year did not start very well, but now I feel completely different. Of course, the reserve of confidence that I managed to gain in recent weeks is of great importance,” Medvedev said in turn. opponent on the tour. Therefore, my victory today does not mean that it will always be so. Next time it might be different.”

The triumph in Dubai, among other things, allowed Medvedev to rise to third place in the classification, which takes into account the results shown this season, and is used to qualify for the November final tournament in Turin. Of course, it is still very far from him, nevertheless, since the beginning of the year, Medvedev has already scored 1,430 points (of which 1,250 were scored in the last three weeks). He is only 40 points behind second-placed Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas and exactly 1,000 points behind leader Novak Djokovic.

And Medvedev set an original “geographical” record. He became the first tennis player in history to win his first 18 titles in 18 different cities. This list includes: Sydney, Winston-Salem, Tokyo, Sofia, Cincinnati, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Paris, London, Marseille, Santa Ponsa, Toronto, New York, Los Cabos, Vienna, Rotterdam, Doha and Dubai . On Sunday, he flies to California for the next Masters 1000 event in Indian Wells.

Evgeny Fedyakov