Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz are a level above the rest of the ATP Tour, but Andrey Rublev is determined to get there.
A guy willing to literally spill blood for his tennis career isn’t someone not to trust to try anything to achieve his goal. Rublev has been a hard-working tennis player for much of his career, but it seems like the final step is eluding him.
It’s been a few years since he’s been at the fringe Top 5 level, but he seemingly can’t figure things out. It’s not a problem of not knowing what to do because he clearly knows what needs to happen for him to get there.
Putting that into practice requires more work, which is going to happen in the offseason. He talked to Championat about the season and what needs to happen next.
This year I have improved a lot in my backhand. This is something that I feel very good about, that it has become better. And
I increased my movement. Now I move around the court much faster than
at the beginning of the year. I began to maintain pace and speed much
better, and began to defend better.
When it comes to improvement, Rublev joked that ‘everything’ needs to improve. That’s fairly normal because it’s true. As he keeps improving, so do his rivals, so there is a constant need to push to become better.
Even Novak Djokovic is becoming better with every year, as crazy as it sounds, and to keep up, Rublev thinks that psychology needs to improve most.
What needs to be improved? A ton of everything. The
main thing, of course, is psychology. This is what I miss the most
compared to Novak Djokovic, Daniil Medvedev, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik
Sinner. They are much more stable than me psychologically.’
He’s not wrong about that because let’s take the US Open match against Daniil Medvedev. Rublev was up a break in all of those sets and played really well, but simply couldn’t keep focus.
He’s a very emotional player, but that can be a detriment at times. It’s not the only thing of course, because he’s not quite happy with his second serve either.
As for the technical aspects, the movement can be further improved. And we (my team) need to improve my second serve. This component clearly stands out to me from a bad point of view compared to everyone else in the top 10. Everyone serves the second one stronger than me.
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