Sinner out, unexpected revolution: things have changed so much over the past few months that it ended up this way.
Tactically there is little that can be taught him. He may very well be the one, indeed, to take the chair and lecture others, from the point of view of strategies to be adopted on the field. Daniil Medvedev felt it was time, however, to throw open the doors of his team to a new element, and lo and behold, in his presence came the highly prepared Gilles Simon.
A collaboration, that between the Russian and the Frenchman, that promises to be very interesting, if only for the fact that it will usher in, certainly, unexpected scenarios. Behind the scenes, to tell the truth, Simon has already been there for a while. The two have been working together since December, but they had not yet revealed this to anyone. “In Australia,” Gilles revealed, “I sent all the pre-match tactics. During the matches I was sending instructions to Cervara (Medvedev’s longtime coach, ed.) who transmitted them more or less in real time to Daniil!” So there was his hand in those two treacherous first sets played in Melbourne in the final, when it had seemed that Jannik Sinner could not tame the then world No. 3.
Yes, Sinner, that same Sinner who has been giving Medvedev a run for his money, in the truest sense of the word, in recent months. Ever since the South Tyrolean found a way to defuse him, there was nothing for the Russian to do. And if we could have imagined that the azure was no longer in his good graces, we certainly could not have predicted that the Moscow native would “detest” him to this extent.
Sinner, be careful: you are no longer in his good graces
There is also the name of the King of Melbourne, in fact, on the black list Daniil allegedly provided to the new element of his team the moment he joined the team.
A blacklist with all the trappings that Medvedev would have drawn up, so it seems, pointing out all the players he just doesn’t like to face. The list has 16 opponents in total and it is on them, in particular, that Medvedev and Simon will focus their work. The goal is to prepare a tactic to be implemented against each of them, to make sure that no one more, Sinner included, can impeach the former world No. 3.
And who would have thought this time a year ago that the roles would be reversed and that Jannik would become the black beast of Daniil, who used to “yawn” from boredom, so easy was it to beat him?