Kei Nishikori can't compete at high level for longer, says John McEnroe
John McEnroe believes that Kei Nishikori retired too many times in mid-match during his career. The quarter-final against Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open on Wednesday was just the one of a long list and in an interview to Nine McEnroe spoke about the Serb and the Japanese. 'Novak knew that Nishikori has played three five-setters. The guy looked absolutely spent in the warm-up. That's when you know, you're going to have a big smile on your face. It's sort of like the over/under - is he even going to finish the match? You could tell in the first game he was hurting bad. It's too bad, but it just shows you in an individual sport, if you have to waste that much energy ... and some of this was Kei's fault. He should have put away Karlovic in three sets, he could have won his first-round match against a qualifier more easily but he didn't, and it ended up catching up to him. You should read into it that it's sort of like a middleweight playing heavyweights. At a certain point, he gives in mentally. That's why he hired Chang. Michael wouldn't do that, and you could see Michael was dismayed in the coaches box; 'Why do you have to sort of stop playing?' That's not in his (Chang's) DNA, so he's trying to get that more into Kei's. But Kei ... some guys and girls have higher thresholds of pain than others and they can go out there and compete at a higher level for longer. But he's not one of them."
On Serena Williams's loss to Karolina Pliskova, McEnroe added: 'A little bit of a choke. They are human beings. When you see Roger - he goes up against Tsitsipas and then he loses - but you look back at their accomplishments and you say: "Oh my god, what they have done already is out of this world!" If you said Pete Sampras, who has 14, would be overtaken by three guys, you would be like: "You are crazy".'
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from Tennis World USA http://bit.ly/2DEyLGd
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