The new category tournament The ongoing ATP Masters 1000 is the protagonist of the new daily appointment on the OA Sport YouTube channelthat is to say TennisMania Special Madrid Open: Eurosport commentator Guido Monaco talked about the premature elimination of Lorenzo Musetti.
On the defeat suffered yesterday by Lorenzo Musetti: “We’ve talked about it many times, every time he loses a match we go back to it, then I don’t even know if it’s the correct approach, because we win and lose. It is clear that when you go into the clay season with Musetti, out of respect for him, you have very high expectations, then there are the opponents and there are the moments of form. Yesterday, for example, Seyboth Wild, the Brazilian, played a very aggressive game, which led Lorenzo to say that famous phrase that many have reported, ‘They are all phenomena against me’, which is a phrase that recalls that culture, or if you prefer subculture, which was very much part of Italian tennis, of Italian players or of Italian tennis of a lower level, that is, this reference to bad luck to ‘They’re all angry with me’ to ‘I’m not winning because we they are things that do not depend on my will or my strength, which are clearly in total antithesis compared to what we see in Sinner, but which we now see in the majority of professional players, where the excuse essentially does not exist. There is a level of professionalism and attitude, which does not mean that Lorenzo is not professional in all aspects of his life, in training, etc., but there is this underlying culture, I repeat, this underlying habit of finding external causes. I have always said that in this he reminds me a lot of Fabio Fognini, then we must always separate what is the externalization, the release also given by the tension, because Musetti, just like Fabio Fognini, always plays with a large dose of tension on him, this it should not be forgotten“.
There are also the merits of the opponents: “He certainly didn’t play at his best, but the opponent, especially in the final part, played with truly remarkable courage and drive. On the other hand, a player capable of beating Medvedev at Roland Garros last year in five sets is not exactly the latest addition. I open parentheses, Brazil which now with this Fonseca, this young boy who is really strong, and already ready for these levels, is starting to have a truly very very fearsome team. It’s a shame for them that at least the final stages of the Davis Cup are no longer played on clay. They are two important players, opponents among other things of Italy in Bologna in September, but we know, in playing conditions that are theoretically less favorable to them. Fonseca is ready, perhaps Musetti is not yet ready to make that leap that we expect, that American boy Blanch is absolutely not ready, who made his debut, I wish he had made his debut, against Nadal the other day. I struggled to understand the meaning of the second wild card in two almost consecutive 1000m for a boy who was still so immature, still so little ready.“.
The expectations are always high on Lorenzo Musetti: “He is one of those characters, a little explainable, a little less, who attracts these comments, because obviously there has always been a lot of talk about him, to tell you the boy’s potential, he was in the junior Slam finals with boys compared to whom he had two years younger. Partly the way he behaves, partly those words that come out every now and then, these great expectations, these slightly exaggerated comparisons, mean that there is a package whereby when he does not respect certain predictions or certain expectations, he is quite massacred. I continue, at the risk of being boring, to see great similarities, with certain attitudes and certain words, not all attitudes, with Fognini. Fognini is a player who I heard with my own ears at the Foro Italico, playing against Nadal, say ‘This one always hits the ball and goes onto the pitch, this one just runs’. When you play tennis you say a lot of stupid things, which you obviously don’t think because it’s a way of letting off steam. Everyone has their own“.
Some behaviors are difficult to modify: “He’s been playing tennis since he was six, seven years old and playing matches. It’s not that he found himself a professional out of nowhere, so he has a history and habits, even bad habits, that you struggle to shake off even when you should be an exemplary professional, don’t say a word out of place, but because it’s your way of being on the field. Obviously you can polish something, in some periods you manage to polish, but it’s as if it were a background, as if it were DNA, which at a certain point under stress comes out, and the biggest stupid thing comes out, or said out loud , because maybe others say it too, but they have the cunning, or the habit of saying it more quietly or even keeping it inside, but those same things that Fognini or Musetti says out loud were probably also thought by Federer in certain moments“.
