Davis Cup Finals: Daniil Medvedev - "Djokovic owes me a dinner"
Daniil Medvedev was in a great mood after his Russians beat Spain at the Davis Cup Finals. For the rifle aid for Novak Djokovic and the Serbian team, the second in the world number one without further ado an invitation to dinner from the 20-time major champion.
by Michael Rothschädl
last edit: Nov 29, 2021, 08:48 pm
The mood in the Serbian quarter in Innsbruck is likely to have become more tense on Sunday evening when old master Feliciano Lopez marked the 1-0 for the blatant outsiders from Spain with his first top ten win in over three years against Andrey Rublev. Especially since the memories of the Russian number one, Daniil Medvedev, of Pablo Carreno Busta are not necessarily the best, the world number two was defeated by the Iberian in the quarter-finals of the Tokyo Olympics this year.
In the end, however, the Russian stayed cool and calmed the Serbian team, especially since they only had to hope for a single game win in the Russian doubles to advance to the quarter-finals. On that evening, they once again proved supportive and lifted themselves as well as the team around Novak Djokovic into the round of the last eight.
Dinner with Djokovic?
A circumstance that apparently seemed to have an extremely positive influence on the mental life of Daniil Medvedev, the Russian was extremely happy at the subsequent press conference. "One day Novak will have to invite me to dinner for today," joked the world number two. "It was fun because during the double game, some Serbian people, I'm not going to tell who, sent us messages on our phones to encourage us to win. This format encourages these types of situations and we just thought about the game to win, no matter who we throw out and who we don't. "
While Serbia will be the big favorite in the duel with Kazakhstan on Wednesday, the Russians will decide the quarter-finals of this year's Davis Cup against Sweden on Thursday. Medvedev also emphasized that they are fully aware of their role as favorites: "The team's self-confidence has grown a lot after beating such a competitive team like Spain, even if they didn't have their best players with them, but they played in front of a home crowd and it means it a lot to beat them. We're looking forward to the knockout phase. "