Daniil Medvedev tasted the Viennese court – Newspaper Kommersant No. 201 (7402) of 10/28/2022

One of the quarter-finalists of the Erste Bank Open, the 500 tournament of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) in Vienna with a prize fund of €2.4 million, was Daniil Medvedev, who beat Austrian Dominic Thiem in two games. Thus, the Russian retains the chances to guarantee himself participation in the final tournament of the year Nitto ATP Finals, which will be held in Turin from November 13 to 20, by the end of this week. For this to happen, regardless of the results of his competitors, Medvedev needs to take the title in Vienna.

The fairly large tournaments taking place this week in Vienna and Basel, the winners of which will receive 500 rating points each, are not decisive, but very important in terms of the distribution of vacant tickets to the Nitto ATP Finals. Recallthat at the moment five have secured the right to play in Turin – the Spaniards Carlos Alcaras and Rafael Nadal, the Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas, the Norwegian Kasper Ruud and the Serb Novak Djokovic, and for three free places in the list of participants in the final competition to one degree or another at the moment still claiming ten people.

In any case, their dispute will be finally resolved by the results of this year’s last 1000 category competition – the Rolex Paris Masters, which starts next Monday.

There is, however, an option in which by that time there will be only two vouchers to Turin. The fact is that Daniil Medvedev can secure the right to play at the Nitto ATP Finals on Sunday if he takes the title in Vienna. The task is not very simple, but real, because at the Erste Bank Open he was seeded under the first number, and the level of play is still very solid.

In the more than two weeks that have passed since Medvedev was in Astana due to a sprain with a score of 1: 1 in sets had to give up from the continuation of the semi-final against Djokovic, he managed not only to celebrate the birth of his daughter, but also to receive medical treatment. The first full-fledged training session after the injury, the Russian tennis player held last Saturday. After it, he decided to try his luck in Vienna, where in the first round in exactly one hour he coped with the best Georgian tennis player Nikoloz Basilashvili, who was in a deep crisis, and in the second he confidently passed a more dangerous opponent – the idol of the Austrian public Dominic Thiem.

The 29-year-old 2020 US Open champion, who fell into the middle of the top 100 in June with a wrist injury, has set himself the goal of returning to the top 100 before the end of this season. And now Tim is very close to solving it – in any case, at two recent October 250 category tournaments in Gijon and Antwerp, he reached the semi-finals, which allowed him to rise in the ranking to 113th place. At home, of course, he was determined to put up the most stubborn resistance to Medvedev, and at first he succeeded, but in the second half of the first game, a turning point came. The Russian won three very tense games – the sixth, seventh and eighth, in the ninth he took someone else’s serve again, and in the second set he limited himself to one break. As a result – 6:3, 6:3 in 1 hour 38 minutes.

Medvedev was very good. He showed his trademark counter-attacking tennis and quickly managed to overcome Tim, who played against the backdrop of fatigue after the hardest meeting of the first round.

Medvedev’s next opponent will be the Italian Yannick Sinner, who is part of the group of his persecutors and who coped in two games with the Argentine Francisco Cerundolo.

The position of the main contenders for participation in the Nitto ATP Finals looks like this today. With a “passing score” of 3955 points, Medvedev has 3645, Andrei Rublev – 3440, Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime – 3225, American Taylor Fritz – 2910, Pole Hubert Hurkach – 2860. Moreover, Rublev with his defeat in the second round of Erste Bank Open from Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrova with a score of 3:6, 4:6 somewhat complicated his life, since Auger-Aliassime, if he reaches the final of the tournament in Basel, can practically catch up with him, and if he wins there, even get ahead of him. It is not clear whether the Canadian will have enough strength, because, having recently won two titles – in Florence and Antwerp, he is spending the third consecutive busy week. In addition, one of the potential rivals of Auger-Aliassime in Basel is the world ranking leader Carlos Alcaraz.

Evgeny Fedyakov