Italy has realized that even in tennis there are mediocre coaches, good ones and sensational ones like Darren Cahillone of the two technicians (the other is Simone Vagnozzichampion of technique) of the new number one in world tennis Jannik Sinner.
We realize today that Cahill is not new to these works: he had already hoisted his compatriot to the top Lleyton Hewitt and then Andre Agassi and then again Simona Halep. Three different tennis players in three different situations – a very young man, an already champion in an existential crisis, a Romanian woman from a different culture than an Australian. It didn’t take Jannik to realize that Cahill is the best coach of tennis in the world for 25 years, which is why it is not only Sinner who has chosen Darren but also and above all the opposite.
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Jannik was good at proposing a different role. Cahill himself calls him the “dad” of the team. The field coach would have been Vagnozzi while Darren would have had the delegation on the side tactical and psychological, of course without forgetting the racket when Simone is absent. Not a super coach who commands from above, as has been fashionable in the last 15 years starting from the hiring of Ivan Lendl from Murray, but a second coach equal to the first, only with a complementary area of expertise. Cahill is a phenomenon in the management of sportsmen rather than tennis players in the strict sense. Because he projects onto others what he has failed to be. Best ranking the 22nd placewon two tournaments, top in a slam, the semi-final at the US Open 1988, for the rest third and second rounds: an excellent tennis player, not a top player. He has never played the matches he coaches Sinner for, so he manages to make them seem normal in the eyes of the predestined under pressure.
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Cahill is the Guardiola of tennis. As a player he came close to the best, as a coach he achieved it by understanding the game better than the others. Cahill, like Pep, played more to understand than to win. An analyst, more than an agonist. It is enough to find his analyzes online on ESPN, a role he allowed himself in the months between one job and another, for proof of this. He is an enlightened one. One of those who train to innovate, not to glorify themselves. Since his father was a football coach, he “stole” the data management system called SportsCode and applied it to tennis to coach Hewitt, in an era when statistics were not as advanced as they are today. Would Sinner have become number one even without Cahill? Impossible to say. Of course, Cahill was the number one coach even before coaching Sinner.
