Old school Mischa leads Zverevs into second round of Wimbledon
losers banking 35,000 pounds ($45,216.50) this year, some wondered if the sums of money at stake were the deciding factor on why unfit players turned up.
“It’s a lot of money. For some it’s more, for some it’s less,” said seven-time Wimbledon champion Federer whose first round workout lasted a mere 43 minutes before Dolgopolov retired while trailing 6-3, 3-0, 30-30. He felt the Grand Slams should look into adopting a financial compensation system that is in place on the ATP Tour.
Kyrgios said he had gone against medical advice and chose to play as “it’s my favourite tournament”. Federer said Dolgopolov decided to cut his losses after he “felt too much pain on the serve”. On each occasion, the trainer was called to aid the two players but the treatments offered could not salvage the situation.
“I’m sure the players that retired... this tournament has a special place in players’ careers. In this sport, there’s so much weight behind it and significance about it,” said Djokovic.
Federer added that players might come out in the hope that “miracles happen. “You never know if you hang around, you start drop-shotting the (other) guy, (he) twists his ankle, you move on.
Alexander Zverev is hailed by German tennis fans as the man most likely to emulate Boris Becker’s Wimbledon feats but it is actually his older brother Mischa whose game has more in common with the threetimes champion.
The siblings -- the first to both be seeded in the Wimbledon men’s singles since Americans Gene and Sandy Mayer in 1982 -eased into round two on Tuesday using vastly different methods.
While 20-year-old 10th seed Alexander bludgeoned Evgeny Donskoy with his powerful baseline game, Mischa, nine years his senior and seeded 29, dispatched Australian Bernard Tomic with an old-school serve-and-volley masterclass.
“I followed my serve in 99.9 percent of the time today,” Mischa said in an interview with Reuters. “I can only remember one second serve that I stayed back. I come in on every serve.”
He said his Russian father Alexander, a former professional player, had taught him the skills of serve and volley -- a tactic only a handful of Tour players still employ.
“When did I realise (I could serve and volley)? When I realised my baseline game wasn’t good enough,” he said.
“I had to come up with a Plan B. My dad was a great serve and volleyer so he knew how to do it and knew how to train. At a young age I started to spend a lot of time at the net and realised it was something that came naturally.”
It was a style that completely flummoxed world number one Andy Murray at this year’s Australian Open when left-hander Zverev pulled off a massive fourth-round upset.
That result reminded the tennis world that there were, in fact, two Zverevs in the highest echelons of the game after several injury-plagued years had seen Mischa, a top-50 player in 2009, slide outside the top 1,000.
The low point came in 2014 when he needed surgery to his left wrist, but thanks to his brother’s emergence it also represented something of a turning point too.
“For four or five years I was not in my best shape,” Zverev, who claimed his first Wimbledon main draw victory for eight years on Tuesday, said. “A lot of injuries and you start not to be as motivated and not to train as hard as you should.