Dominic Thiem plays his best season to date as a professional tennis player, but poor results in the last few weeks have clouded 2017’s success. With a strong appearance at the ATP Finals in London, he could forget these weak performances.
It was a successful year for Dominic Thiem. The 24-year-old won the ATP-500 tournament in Rio de Janeiro this year, and was also in the finals in Barcelona and at the Masters in Madrid, where he was defeated by Rafael Nadal. Thiem currently has 3,815 world ranking points in his account, which is exactly 400 points more than in the previous year. In addition, the current fourth place in the world ranking is the highest place in his young career.
“Fourth place is much more than I had expected at the beginning of the season,” Thiems coach Günther Bresnik recently expressed his satisfaction with Thiems’ seasonal performances, although not completely:”On the other hand, I am disappointed because third place would have been possible.
While his good friend Sascha Zverev, who is ahead of Thiem in the world rankings, has not yet reached a Grand Slam quarter-finals in his career, Thiem entered the round of the last four for the second time this year at the French Open. The Lower Austrian also reached the last sixteen in each of the three other Grand Slams.
Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and even sand court king Nadal all suffered defeat against Thiem in the course of the season. These consistently good results brought Thiem to the ATP World Tour Finals for the second consecutive year, where he will meet Grigor Dimitrov, David Goffin and – for the fifth time this season – Nadal in the group Pete Sampras.
Nevertheless, Thiem did not take advantage of his chance to get stuck in the world’s top tennis league because of the many injuries suffered by top stars. The decisive factor for Zverev and not Thiem to be in third place at the moment is a true negative run in autumn. The Austrian has only won two of his seven matches since the US Open’s dramatic defeat against Juan Martin del Potro in the last sixteen after a 2-0 lead over Juan Martin del Potro.
Whether jet lag in Tokyo or scraped toes in Vienna, Thiem has been hampered by a variety of circumstances in the past few weeks, and he had a similar experience in the past season, when he was even worse off scoring 1:6 victories over the same period.
Thiem played 26 tournaments in the top 20, but lack of physical fitness should not be the reason for the drop in performance: Austria’s number one is considered to be one of the fittest players on the tour, and Thiem laid the foundation for his strong physical performance in the run-up to the season.
His three-week training camp in Tenerife, which he completes every year in winter, has become so popular that some of the top players have asked coach Bresnik to take part. Next December, Philipp Kohlschreiber, Jan-Lennard Struff and David Goffin will be the training partners for the coming December, in addition to the countrymen Dennis Novak and Sebastian Ofner.
Rather, the stresses and strains of a long season at Thiem have an effect above all on the mental level,”he has not trained well. Bitter defeats like in Wimbledon against Berdych or in New York against Del Potro, where he had everything in his hand,”Bresnik tries to classify the results of the trip to Asia,”It’s him who is most affected, I don’t have to say anything.”
Several defeats after missed match balls left scratches in Thiems self-confidence. Suddenly, the sovereignty of a top 10 player, with whom Thiem convinced during the clay court season, seems to have disappeared.
It is particularly noticeable that Thiem increasingly falls into old behavior patterns in his last games: If a match does not run according to his taste, Thiem wants to force his forehand on his opponents with all means. However, in such phases he often overpowered and looked for the winning shot too fast, so that some of his balls sailed to the end.
Thiem tried to eradicate these little things during the last days of training in the Wiener Südstadt. In front of Bresnik’s eyes, Thiem spent several hours a day on the tennis court to prepare himself well for London.
The group draw for the end-of-year tournament could have been easier for Thiem: Of the seven opponents who also qualified for London, the eight-time tournament winner has only two against a negative result – Nadal and Goffin are both in the same group as Thiem.
In addition, the indoor hard court is the only surface on which Thiem has not yet won a tournament:”Yes, I’m a bit hard on myself in the arena,”Thiem said before the Masters in Paris,”but every week of the tournament offers me a new chance and I try to give my best”.
Many people still see Thiem as a sand court specialist, but the right-hander has already won a title in hard court in his career (2016, Acapulco). Of course, in Roland Garros Thiem celebrated his greatest Grand Slam successes so far, winning 75 percent of his matches in Paris. But even on the hard court of the US Open, Thiem lost 73 percent of his games as the winner and thus came off the pitch only slightly worse than in Paris.
Thiem is also pleased that the seats on the ATP Tour became slower in the season 2017 through the bank. The World Rankings Fourth is able to score direct points more easily with his speed from the baseline even on slow surfaces than players who bring less speed into the balls.
Thiem traveled to London for the ATP finals in 2016 with similarly weak performances, where he played good tennis. He was able to take Novak Djokovic one set and beat Gael Monfils before Milos Raonic defeated the dream of a semi-final.
All three opponents are not included this year. Thiem knows that this time it seems comparatively easy to do well in London due to the lack of experience of the other participants. In London, he is thus blowing for the last attack of a successful season – and has his head under control.