dpWhen the fourth round of a Grand Slam rolls around and there have been upsets in the first week, there can be equal parts joy and agony. Players achieving dreams they thought might never be realized scarcely know how to keep their feet on the ground. Top players who see a window of opportunity and then can’t squeeze through it can be left disconsolate.
At the French Open, it was Canada’s Félix Auger-Aliassime, the No. 3 seed at Wimbledon, who was left disconsolate after a loss to Flavio Cobolli, the No. 9 seed here from Italy.
Come Monday, it was Alex de Minaur, the No. 5 seed from Australia, who lost to Cobolli, then expressed the devastation of elite sport. Auger-Aliassime said he was not the player he wanted to be in Paris. In London, de Minaur went a few fathoms deeper.
💬 “I think one of us went out to win the match, and the other went out not to lose the match,” de Minaur said in his news conference after a 7-5, 7-6(4), 6-3 loss. “I think it’s pretty self-explanatory who was who.
“It breaks me inside. That’s the reality of it. Many, many hours gets put into my craft, and countless years, to kind of have moments like these. To not step up to the plate, it’s truly gut-wrenching. Yeah, it’s very tough.”
He did not stop there. When asked about some of his close-run defeats, especially at Grand Slams, he said that “sadly, it feels like they just keep on coming.”
“You go through moments in your career, times where you feel that there’s, you know, opportunities to be taken, to take the next step, to make it to the next level, to become an even better version of yourself. And to fall short constantly, you start doubting yourself. You start doubting whether you’re going to be able to break through and kind of take it to the next step.”
