Saddest sight of the Open: Demon in the gym when there’s ‘nothing to get ready for’

Alex de Minaur’s inconsolable. He tells us why.

Russia's Andrey Rublev, left, hugs Australia's Alex de Minaur after their fourth-round match. Picture: AFP

Alex de Minaur was inconsolable. Speechless. He sat on an exercise bike in the players’ gym and put a towel over his head. He didn’t say boo to his nearest and dearest after the one that got away against the crazed Andrey Rublev. He just kept on warming down ahead of an Australian Open quarter-final that would never come.

You had to admire the professionalism. Galling losses make most folks ditch the gym and get the heck out of Melbourne Park as quickly as their courtesy cars will take them. A warm-down is really warming-up for your next fixture. What a heartbreaking sight. De Minaur finally put his abject despondency into words.

“Maybe a couple years ago or even last year I would be sitting here, maybe even happy with the result, saying I probably shouldn’t have won, he’s higher ranked than I am, I took him to five sets, pretty decent effort,” the World No.10 said after his wild 6-4, 6-7 (5/7), 6-7 (4/7), 6-3, 6-0 loss. “But it’s completely changed because now I’m sitting here and I’m absolutely devastated. I saw it as a great opportunity and a match that I strongly believed I could have won. But it just slipped away.”

De Minaur’s weakness has always been his serve. It completely deserted him against a frenzied opponent; Rublev stuck his tongue out and thrashed his head around more than the lead singer of KISS. Any more berserk and Rublev might have done an Ozzy Osbourne and bitten the head off a live bat right there in Rod Laver Arena. He was there for the taking but de Minaur let him off the hook by landing only 53 per cent of his first serves. That kept giving Rublev another sniff. In a disastrous fifth set, de Minaur made only 47 per cent of his first deliveries. No hope, really. By comparison, Novak Djokovic landed 70 per cent of his first serves while demolishing Adrian Mannarino.

De Minaur’s Open promised so much. Delivered quite a bit. Finished with a towel over its head. “It’s a tough, tough match to finish up my campaign here,” he said after his third consecutive fourth-round defeat at the Open. “Obviously had aspirations for more. My time here was cut short. A couple of things let me down. My serve was probably one of them. I just wasn’t finding first serves. In those crucial moments, I was giving him too many second serves and he was able to just swing freely. I felt great and thought I was going to be able to expose him physically in the fifth set. I played a couple average points in the first game, and he played two really good points, and all of a sudden I was behind the eight ball and playing catch-up. He just let loose.”

De Minaur won only 50 per cent of his second-serve points. Give those stats, it’s a wonder he took it to five. “I had more break points than he did, had more chances than he did, but I just wasn’t able to execute those chances and he was, right?” he said. “Therein lies the difference in this match. My serve was something that has been really good to me this whole Australian summer and today it kind of disappeared. It’s disappointing. It is what it is. Life goes on. I know the areas I’ve got to work on. Like I’ve done my whole career, I’ll get better. I’ll improve. Hopefully next time I’ll be able to take it to the next level.”

De Minaur didn’t press forward as much as he needed to. Rublev’s a ball machine. You’re going to struggle to win enough baseline rallies against a ball machine. De Minaur had the tools to make him malfunction. He needed to chip and chop a few backhands but primarily, get to the net more often than he did. Sorry to be such a stats nerd here, but in three quick sets against Flavio Cobolli, de Minaur charged the net on 32 occasions. He won 26 of those points. In the marathon against Rublev, he was at the net just 36 times. Won 26 points up there. That’s where he needed to be. De Minaur won 94 of their 216 baseline rallies.

The rock ’n’ roll Russian looked out on his feet after set three. Swung out of his shoes. Winners started screaming even louder than him. “In my eyes, he just let go,” de Minaur said. “Caught a little purple patch. Too good in the end. I thought he was hurting physically but he just started swinging freely and the balls went in. It’s not a match I lost physically. It was just that the racquet was taken out of my hand. Got to a stage where I couldn’t get him moving or expose his movement. He was just standing and hitting from every single part of the court at just mach 10. That’s probably the most disappointing part of the whole match.”

Australian interest in the Open may fall 20,000 leagues under the sea without de Minaur but if you love your tennis and big-time sport, Rublev versus Jannik Sinner on Tuesday will be a cracker. Rublev’s such an open book there’s no cover. In his on-court interview after beating de Minaur, he was asked what was going on inside his head when he was part leader singer of KISS, part Ozzy Osbourne.

“When I was losing, two sets to one down, I broke him in the beginning and then he broke me back,” Rublev said. “And then I started telling myself, ‘You’re going to die today, but you will do everything you can. Better not to be inside my head at this time … it’s like a scary movie.”

Saddest sight of the Open remained de Minaur on his exercise bike close to midnight. He said it didn’t matter how tired he was because “I’ve got nothing to get ready for”.