“I’m happy to be able to play in the tournament,” said Alexander Zverev before his difficult opening match against Borna Coric (today, not before 5:30 pm): “We know each other very well, there are no surprises.
He has a big challenge ahead of him in his first game against the Croatian Borna Coric (ATP 36). But Alexander Zverev (ATP 3) can enter the most exciting match of the opening round with new confidence – and a physically “good feeling again”.
“This is the first time I’ve trained properly and moved properly. And it was all right. I am happy that I can play in the tournament,” said the new German tennis superstar in a press conference on Sunday before his tournament start.
In the lost quarter-final match against Dominic Thiem at the French Open, the 21-year-old from Hamburg contracted a 4.5-centimetre-long muscle tear in his left thigh, which healed much faster than expected.
“Actually, this healing process takes up to four weeks, for me it’s overgrown again within nine days”, says Zverev, “at first I had to fear that I wouldn’t play in Halle and Wimbledon at all”. Zverev now expects a “really tough match” against Coric: “We know each other very well, there are no real surprises.
Similar to his friend Thiem from Austria, Zverev’s expectations have grown with the steep upswing of recent months: “At 18, you’re happy to win a semi-final in a smaller ATP tournament. But today’s big tournaments are about winning against the best. That’s quite normal.”
Zverev has been one of the absolute top ATP pros for the last year and a half: in 2017 he won five competitions, including the Masters tournaments in Rome and Montreal. And in 2018 he booked cup triumphs again in Munich and Madrid.
In Halle, too, Zverev has left little room for improvement. In the last two years he reached the final and lost to record champion Roger Federer in 2017. “It would be nice to have this duel again,” Zverev said.
So, what do you have to do to beat the maestro on his beloved tennis green? “Playing better than him,” Zverev joked, adding: “The important thing is to play even faster than he does. Because Roger doesn’t like that very much. “He usually enters a grass court tournament as the favourite.”
Like everyone else, Zverev has to cope with the transition from sand to grass these days: “They are two different worlds. First the slowest surface of the year, then the fastest surface of the year. It takes time to get into good rhythm.” The hardest part of the change, however, is something completely different for Alexander Zverev: “On this surface I lose more often in practice than anywhere else against my brother Mischa.
Together with his brother Alexander Zverev has already celebrated a sense of achievement in Halle: On Monday, the brothers defeated Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi and Jean-Julier Rojer 6-7 (7), 7-6 (2) and 10-8 in a match that began on Court 1 and ended under a closed roof at Gerry Weber Stadium.