YOU BLEW IT, KYLE
Muddled Edmund mucks it all up from the verge of victory
NINE points from home. First, as John McEnroe said, he ‘blew it’. Then, his right leg went. And, suddenly, what had looked like a straightforward afternoon for Kyle Edmund ended with him sunk in the second round.
Afterwards he might as well have shown up on the psychologist’s couch, his mind a
soup of confusion during the press conference. Was he really injured? Had it really hampered him? Or, as he suggested, was he simply not fit enough for the task of a long Wimbledon match?
You could point at his head or at his legs, and he was entirely confused as to where to apportion the blame.
Whatever the diagnosis, the bald fact is that the top British player in the men’s singles had been defeated as the shadows gathered on Centre Court by Fernando Verdasco, the 35-year-old Spaniard, who had blown hot and cold for much of the contest.
There was much to rue, initially, as Edmund unpicked the strapping on his finger as he slumped in his chair after a threehour 43-minute defeat mainly spent in a mutual exchange of thumping forehands and, later, in his curious media debrief.
He was left to ponder the moment when he should have started to close out the match, at 3-1 and 40-0 up in the third set. He then hit six unforced errors, lost the game and all the momentum he had carried up to that point.
‘You’ve got to win those points,’ admitted the 24-year-old Yorkshireman.
As for the injury, he was uncertain of what had happened. ‘Yeah, I just slipped over. When you slip, it’s just a bit of a shock. You obviously don’t plan to slip, so... when stuff like that happens, you have just got to regroup and keep going.’
Confusingly, he said: ‘It didn’t hold me back.
‘My leg just straightened. In that moment, I felt something. I was able to play on. It was a long match, quite physical. The sort of intensity that I showed in the first part gradually just declined. I was not able to keep that level up. Physically, I tapered off a bit.’
Asked if he thought his undoing was as much mental as physical, he said: ‘Not really, no. Yeah, I don’t even know what to say to that.’
Is it a question of conditioning? ‘Yeah, definitely I need to improve. Coming in to Wimbledon, a lot of focus had been on trying to get physically stronger.
‘Before Queen’s it was about going to the gym rather than putting hours in on the tennis court. Now I’ve got to try and put some more hours in.’
It raises questions about whether there is some friction with his coach Mark Hilton about plotting his development. But it should be pointed out that Edmund does not have a reputation for being a shirker and he can fight hard, too, just as he did in his gutsy first-round victory over the home-backed Jeremy Chardy at a partisan Roland Garros a few weeks ago.
He has also trained with US Navy SEAL David Goggins, trying to give himself an edge.
And he had played well up until his problems, building on his decent opening match on Monday and his semi-final at Eastbourne on his way to SW19.
But then he lost a tiebreak in the third — the sixth time in seven attempts this year — and on we went into a fourth and fifth set.
His play from here on became erratic, as Verdasco came up trumps. The Spaniard was now strong, smiling even when losing a line-call challenge, whereas before he — and his wife, Ana Boyer — had been howling Spanish profanities into the air in exasperation.
The crowd no doubt wanted Edmund to win but it was not one of those tidal waves of cheers that we have heard before for our No1s. The roof’s hinges were not under threat.
Despite his twinge, or whatever it was, Edmund did not foresee a period of recovery away from the game. He is scheduled to compete in the Citi Open in Washington at the end of the month.
‘I didn’t get through,’ he said. ‘It’s a lesson learned. I will spend the next few weeks on a good little block (of training) and try to push hard and get my fitness up. There’s a great opportunity in the hard-court season for me.’