Difficulties face Jannik Sinner on the road to victories

     "I was more aggressive but today, I messed up especially from a mental point of view," says Jannik Sinner, the 19-year-old Italian wonderguy after losing his opener at Montpellier (6-3, 2-6, 6-7) to Aljaz Bedene. It might appear that he was on the right track as he was able to hook up two ATP trophies a few tournaments ago. One was at the Sofia Open in Bulgaria defeating Canada's Vasek Pospisil. The other was at the Adelaide International winning the title over an Italian comrade Stefano Travaglia. But did the victories give him a false sense of easiness in capturing titles?

He's trying to solve the puzzle now and fix his game before it unravels more.

     In his match at the Sud de Open in Montpellier he tried to dissect what went haywire. "After the first set, I went on without an idea, or rather I had one but it was wrong," the Italian teen had explained. The game looked for sure to be on Sinner's racket as he won the opening set 6-3. It was the other two sets that did him in as he struggled to maintain his dominance afterwards. Slovenia's Aljaz Bedene quickly started correcting the errors he made from the previous set. The dictating factors and great strategies became the 34th ranked Bedene's game helping him to win the two sets over his Italian teen competitor. "In the first set [Sinner] was the better player...Afterwards I became more aggressive...I think that decided it," Bedene emphasized.

     But there was another factor that may have caused the deterioration of Sinner's winning style and that was in the last set a tiebreak, he started having back issues. He was trailing anyway and the health issue didn't make things any better for the teen. Sinner denies that to be the reason for his loss. "Back pain? It has nothing to do with it...it's 100% my fault my game," he confessed. Getting back into form and correcting mistakes can either take more or less time than predicted. Jannik Sinner just hopes that he'll be able to transform his winning style again quickly. There is the Rotterdam event next week of which he accepted their wild card. He's determined to do well again as he did last year and at least going through to the quarterfinals and maybe deeper this year.

from Tennis World USA https://ift.tt/3aUADeF