S Tsitsipas Tennis Score
Stefanos Tsitsipas was one point away from becoming the first defending Nitto ATP Finals champion since David Nalbandian in 2006 to lose his opening two round-robin matches, but thanks to a costly double fault on match point from Andrey Rublev, the Greek now controls his own destiny.
To reach the semifinals, Tsitsipas will need to defeat Rafael Nadal for the second time in seven tries, and while the odds are stacked against him, he certainly has the right mindset.
“I know it will require a lot of physical effort, and I'm going to have to go through a lot of pain and suffering, so it is going to be difficult match,” Tsitsipas told press. “I’m expecting a fight from my side.”
Defeating Nadal is like climbing a mountain, and doing so with a one-handed backhand is like climbing without an oxygen tank. It’s exhausting. No matter the opponent, if Nadal sees a one-hander across the net, he will pepper that side with heavy crosscourt forehands. It’s the simplest and most repeatable of game plans that has worked nearly 83 percent of the time. According to ultimatetennisstatistics.com, the Spaniard owns a 303-63 record against players with a one-handed backhand.
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Nearly every match at the ATP Finals presents the players with a fresh slate, due to the complex scoring format— a player could theoretically lose his first two matches and still qualify for the semifinals. But judging by the pair's first two matches, it’s clear Nadal has brought a higher level to London.
In addition to suffering physically, Tsitsipas will need to play high risk tennis. At 6’5”, mixing in some serve and volley plays would be wise.
As well as cracking any attackable forehand he’s presented with, like the one below.
Tsitsipas acknowledged he must be the aggressor on Thursday.
“I'm going to try and play aggressive tennis, you can’t play defensive with Rafa,' he said. 'Try to play the rallies, apply pressure, serve well. It's part of the game that I want to play against Rafa. I think everyone has to play this way.”
But there’s one glaring issue in Tsitsipas’ game that will likely prove troublesome tomorrow: his extremely untraditional open-stance slice backhand.
As tennis analyst Matthew Willis pointed out in a thread that is well worth a few minutes of your day, instead of the right-handed Tsitsipas planting his right foot before the slice, he plants his left foot. Because of this technical error, he’s unable to generate enough pace and backspin on the shot, and it often ends up floating instead of skidding through the court.
S Tsitsipas Tennis Scores
Willis presented a few examples of the ATP’s best slice backhands, including Roger Federer's, Dominic Thiem's and Grigor Dimitrov's. All of them hit a closed-stance slice, allowing their weight to transfer onto the front leg. This allows for complete hip-rotation, as well as an open avenue for the right arm to follow through.
2/ Here's a Federer slice (Top) vs one of Tsitsipas' slices today in Vienna (Bottom)????
Federer = closed stance, right foot across body, making contact while right leg is leading. Tsitsipas = open to semi-open stance, making contact while left leg leading pic.twitter.com/njT2nQNGmZ
Last year in London, Nadal was able to expose this weakness over and over again.
Of course, this is just one wrinkle in a high-stakes match that is sure to entertain, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. The oddsmakers peg Nadal as a solid -245 favorite with the most likely outcome a 7-6, 6-4 scoreline. Tsitsipas has beaten Nadal before, and will likely defeat the Spaniard a few more times in his career, but don’t expect the Greek to prevail on Thursday.
The Pick: Rafael Nadal
© Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images Greece's Stefanos Tsitsipas is among a group of young stars poised to challenge tennis's big three in the years to come.Greek flags waved throughout London’s raucous O2 Arena when 21-year-old Stefanos Tsitsipas won the ATP Finals, the most prestigious tournament in men’s tennis outside the four Grand Slams, to cap his breakthrough 2019 season.
With it, Tsitsipas claimed the biggest victory of his young career, having defeated four top-10 opponents, including Roger Federer. And when the 2020 season dawned, he seemed on the cusp of breaking the chokehold that Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic had held on the majors.
But when the 2020 ATP Finals get underway Sunday, the O2 will be without fans, as has been the case nearly everywhere since tennis emerged from quarantine in mid-August. And Tsitsipas (pronounced “TSE-tse-pahs”), the defending champion and now 22, still will be seeking that second signature title.
The global pandemic has taken a toll on tennis, upending the calendar and exiling paying spectators. It also has tested players’ ability to stay in form and improve without steady competition.
Asked to describe his regimen during the five-month hiatus, Tsitsipas said: “Lots of ice cream. Lots of meditation. And lots of training.”
The result has been mixed: some highs, a few lows and a stretch in which he felt his game had plateaued. With a 28-12 record (.700) and one tournament title (Marseille) heading into the ATP Finals, which pits the world’s top eight singles players in a round-robin format, Tsitsipas is likely to finish 2020 ranked where he began, No. 6 in the world.
His season’s highlight was reaching his second career Grand Slam semifinal in October’s French Open, in which he battled back from a two-sets-to-none deficit against world No. 1 Djokovic. But he faded in the fifth set, hampered by a leg injury, while Djokovic, a 17-time Grand Slam champion, elevated his play.
Afterward, Tsitsipas acknowledged the Serbian’s mastery and the gap between them.
“He has reached almost perfection, Novak, in his game style, the way he plays, which is unbelievable to see, honestly,” Tsitsipas said. “That inspires me a lot to go out and work and try to reach that perfectionism, that ability to have everything on the court.”
A Greek god
Tsitsipas’s pursuit of perfection has made compelling entertainment.
At 6-foot-4 and 196 pounds, he is quick and nimble on court, his shoulder-length hair a mop of kinetic energy as he charges the net and races sideline to sideline. He boasts a blistering forehand, an elegant one-handed backhand and an enviable array of shots and tactics. And he competes with a thespian’s repertoire of emotions, at times to his detriment.
Tsitsipas is equally engaging off-court, an avid reader and aspiring filmmaker with a philosophical bent. On Twitter, @StefTsitsipas is more apt to quote artists or share personal musings than tennis minutiae.
“The most dangerous job you can have in your 20s is a comfortable one,” he tweeted amid the pro tour’s lull this summer. In September, a few days after he squandered six match points in a five-set loss to Borna Coric at the U.S. Open, he tweeted, “The biggest victory will be achieved by someone with the greatest imagination and creativity.”
While vacationing in Athens after his French Open defeat, he sought advice about achieving a championship-caliber mind-set and training regimen from Giannis Antetokounmpo, the two-time NBA MVP, and later tweeted a short video of an exchange between the two Greek sporting stars.
Greece has gone tennis-mad since Tsitsipas broke into the top 20 in 2018, according to journalist Vicky Georgatou, who has covered him since he was a young teen. Parents have enrolled their children in lessons. Greece’s public television station started airing his matches. “Greece [was] all about basketball and football,” Georgatou explained. “[Now] everyone in Greece is learning the game because of him.”
Although he now lives in Monte Carlo and trains in France, Tsitsipas is rarely happier than when he straps on a backpack, grabs his video camera and sets out to chronicle all he sees and learns between tournaments. And he’s bringing fans along for the ride, cobbling footage into the 10- to 15-minute posts on his YouTube channel and inviting his 170,000 subscribers to “sail with me on this epic adventure to happiness.”
Installments include a three-day trek to Iceland, where he howled about the frigid air as he swam in an outdoor pool, explored a cave and visited a tomato farm, peppering all he met with questions about Icelandic tradition.
He posted another from travels in Oman. And he waxed philosophical in his dispatch from the Caribbean archipelago of Anegada.
S Tsitsipas Tennis Score
“They say the pages of your passport is the best book,” Tsitsipas said into his camera as goats roamed in the background. “A wish that I have for me is to keep traveling until the last day of my existence. I want to live my life at its fullest.”
Different by design
Tsitsipas is the proud product of two cultures, reared by a Greek father who’s also a tennis instructor and a Russian mother who is a former pro player and coach. Together, they taught the eldest son to look beyond the granular details that translate to incremental gains on a tennis court and to take in the world with the widest possible aperture.
This started when, at age 9, he declared that tennis, more than swimming or soccer, was his true passion. His mom, Julia Apostoli Salnikova, became his first coach. As a young athlete in the former Soviet Union, she was denied many fundamental freedoms, she explained in an interview, so she instilled in her children a love of travel, books and new experiences, taking pains to schedule Stefanos’s tournaments in cities with sights they would enjoy exploring.
“It was very important to me to raise him with a wider knowledge so he could see different things,” said Apostoli Salnikova, who studied broadcast journalism in Moscow after her pro career. “We didn’t spend time in the tennis clubs; we tried to figure out the food, the culture of each place. And when he was speaking to me in Greek, I was answering only in Russian, which made him learn Russian very well.”
At each step of Tsitsipas’s progression, explained his father, Apostolos Tsitsipas, who is now his son’s coach, he and his wife gauged their son’s happiness, convinced that happiness is the foundation of success.
The result is an elite tennis player with a worldview that’s broader than that of many touring pros, whose orbit typically consists of practice, training, matches, recovery and little else.
Martina Navratilova, who won 18 Grand Slam singles titles (and 41 doubles) over a three-decade pro career, believes that will work to Tsitsipas’s benefit.
“It’s great that he is interested in other things because that allows you to escape the tennis,” Navratilova said in a telephone interview. “You only need to be committed to tennis when you’re on the court or when you’re in the gym or when you’re talking about the match. You need to do other stuff that feeds your soul away from tennis.”
As for Tsitsipas’s game, Navratilova applauds his variety of shots, his slice, the timing of his strokes and his sense for when to move forward. She views the competitive gap between him and the sport’s “Big Three” of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic as “not that big,” but it showed in the French Open semifinal against Djokovic, which she covered as a Tennis Channel analyst.
The essential difference, Navratilova said, is that Tsitsipas misses too often on crucial points — something Djokovic, Nadal and Federer rarely do. But she views this as an understandable, “nice problem,” at least in Tsitsipas’s case, because it’s the result of having so many options at his disposal rather than too few.
“He has got all the shots; it’s a question of figuring out when to use which shot,” Navratilova said. “It takes a while for it to be just really by instinct when you have a great all-around game — especially one that requires touch. It takes a bit longer before it becomes second nature. Those players flourish a little bit later.”
Meanwhile, in pursuit of perfection, Tsitsipas continues working on his mental game and ways to progress when the results aren’t coming.
“I guess a loss is a very good lesson where life puts a stop at what you’re doing,” he said after his five-set defeat in the French Open semifinal. “You can reflect on that. You can grow. You can get better. You can take that loss and turn it around, use it as a life lesson to move forward, to become a stronger person.”
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