“I Really Don’t Want to Go” – Australian Tennis Star Raises Concern Over US Open
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One of the bright young stars right now, Alexei Popyrin has been making his mark in World Tennis. He is currently participating in the Ultimate Tennis Showdown. A league started by Patrick Mouratoglou to showcase tennis in a fun and youthful way. In a press conference after his UTS match, yesterday Popyrin told EssentiallySports reporter about his US Open plans as well.
Mouratoglou started UTS to bring in new and younger fans into tennis. Nowadays people don’t have much time to watch a 3-hour long Grand Slam match which will have breaks and distractions in between. So in the UTS, everything happens fast without breaks.
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The matches have a time limit like in football. Forty Minutes is the duration of the match. All matches are divided into four quarters of 10 minutes each. Players serve twice alternatively and the player with the most points won at the end of the quarter wins the quarter. And if at the end of four quarters, it is 2-2 then there is a tiebreaker where the first player to win two consecutive points wins the match. So such sudden death scenarios and tense moments in the matches make it very appealing to the younger crowd.
Popyrin has had a decent run in the tournament. He sits 6th in the standings and has won 3 matches. He played his 7th match in the tournament yesterday against Richard Gasquet. Popyrin lost 3-1 to the French. The score read- 14-11, 15-12, 23-9, 14-21.
After the match, the Australian sat down for a zoom call press conference and talked about his unique experience at the UTS and the resuming tennis season.
How do you like the format of the UTS?
“It’s great. It’s a very big change to what we usually play with the normal format, the format that we play at the ATP. But it’s a good change. It’s really a fun change. The one thing I like about it is much quicker. In between the points, there is not much rest, there’s a lot of action. I think overall its a great format.”
Advantage of practicing at Mouratoglou’s academy
“I think all the players who are playing in this tournament have practiced here every now and then. I don’t think there is any advantage in playing here or playing anywhere else, I think it’s just up to the skills and the way you play. There’s no home-court advantage in tennis I think unless you have a crowd but there is no crowd here.”
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On US Open
“Right now there are talks regarding the US Open but I really don’t want to go with the situation in America right now. But we have to see if we would be forced to go because of ranking points. If the ranking points won’t be frozen then most of us would be forced to go play cause our ranking will drop and we wouldn’t have any say in it. But if the rankings are frozen then I am staying here, I will stay in Europe where it’s safe with my family.”
On the French Open
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“I don’t know. We’ll have to see if anything is going to be played, I think if the same rule is applied for the French Open, it’s big a risk to play especially if they say that they want to play with the fans which I am not sure would be possible right now. It’s very risky to playing anything right now which includes fans. But we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Watch UTS live – https://watch.utslive.tv/
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