Taylor Fritz - "Novak Djokovic is without a doubt the best player"
Taylor Fritz has drawn a positive balance of the tennis year after his loss to Novak Djokovic at the ATP Finals in Turin.
by tennisnet.com
last edit: Nov 20, 2022, 10:16 am
Well: How close was Taylor Fritz to the big sensation, namely his first win against Novak Djokovic, which would have been tantamount to entering the final of the ATP Finals in Turin 2022? When the score was 5:4, 30 both and Fritz's serve, the American had at least one set ball on his racket. However, a spectator felt compelled to verbally intervene in the match at the very moment when Fritz raised his backhand. Instead of going into the open field, the blow went into the net, Djokovic won the second as well as the first set in the tie-break. And entered a final at the unofficial ATP World Championship for the eighth time.
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For Taylor Fritz this would have been an unexpected culmination of a season that was already threatening to collapse in the spring following his triumph in Indian Wells. "I actually missed the entire clay court season, went to the hard court tournaments without training," Fritz summed up after losing to Djokovic, against whom he now has a 0:6 record. "But I was still able to play a really solid year."
Fritz later than Rublev, Tsitsipas and Shapovalov
"Solid" is of course an understatement, Fritz has made it into the top ten players in the world for the first time and will remain number nine in the world over the winter. "I absolutely believe that I belong here," Fritz continued. Observers of the tennis scene were convinced of this much earlier, after all Fritz was able to win the US Open for juniors in 2015. When he was a junior, the now 25-year-old acted on an equal footing with Andrey Rublev, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Denis Shapovalov, who left their mark on the adults earlier than Taylor Fritz.
But Fritz wanted to point out one thing. "It's been a crazy year," he noted. "But I learned: when Novak played, he was the best player. There is no doubt about that. When he didn't play, which has happened a lot this year, we've seen a lot of mixed results. Because if you take Novak out of the equation, everyone is playing almost at the same level. ”It then depends on the form on the day and the respective conditions.
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