The man prepared to cop a spray from Nick Kyrgios

Ashcon Rezazadeh, right, is prepared to cop a spray from Nick Kyrgios.

Who is Nick Kyrgios giving it to in his players box? Probably Ashcon Rezazadeh. Why? Because he’s prepared to cop it.

Rezazadeh is the bespectacled but little-known bloke you always see sitting with Lleyton Hewitt and Kyrgios’s family. He’s the fitness coach for Kyrgios.

They started working together in 2018. On and off, he’s managed to get Kyrgios into the gym, on to the practice court. He doesn’t mind the rage Kyrgios directs at his gang when he loses the plot, nodding like he’s saying it’s OK, it’s OK, perhaps understanding it better than most.

Rezazadeh has worked with former world No 1 Victoria Azarenka and world boxing champ Anthony Joshua in the past. He’s big on the correlation between physical fitness and mental health.

“People seeking health and mental wellbeing, whether that’s a lack of motivation … Whatever that problem is, we’ll be, ‘OK, let’s make you a goal’,” he told Sport360. “Let’s figure out how we’re going to get to that goal.

“Whether it’s nutrition, whether it’s the gym, whether it’s thinking in a certain type of mind frame. And I’m going to say, ‘I’m not a specialist in psychology’. If you can speak to them at a level that they understand, for me that’s the most important, that relatability. If someone can relate to me, or someone can relate to you, I feel that we can get along quite well … I’m hoping that you can be comfortable enough to figure out what’s going on, just be more aware that it’s OK to feel like this.”

Generous to a fault

Alex Zverev had the serving yips at the ATP Cup. Belinda Bencic sledged him by saying he should donate money to a bushfire charity for every double fault at the Australian Open. Instead, he decided to plonk $10,000 for every win — plus the winner’s cheque of $4.12m should he lift the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup.

“Australian dollars,” he kept saying of his 10-grand pledge, just to be clear. Into the third round, that’s a tidy donation already. On his 10-grand-and-rising donation, he said: “The $10,000 in Australian dollars is very, very nice, but my main goal is still hopefully the big one. I’m still far away from that. We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to try my best. Do everything I can for this country.”

As for Bencic, she was wrong. Zverev’s double-fault tally after two rounds: 4. Bencic: 12. He sounded distinctly Australian at the beginning of his response to her. “Yeah-no,” he said. “I mean, it was fun and all that, but I think it should be a positive thing, not double-faulting.”

Easier before Instagram

Zverev, of course, had already sledged Kyrgios by saying plenty of players were “just better than him”. Zverev won the ATP World Tour Finals two years ago and was expected to kick on to slam success by now. It hasn’t happened.

Roger Federer went through something similar. He beat Pete Sampras at 21 years of age. Waited two more years for a major. Zverev said the pressure of expectation was great in the social-media age.

“It’s different than it was 20 years ago,” he said. “With the social media, the mobile phones that we have, the pressure the media puts on us, other people put on us, we are more aware of it than 20 years ago.

“Back then read what’s going on, to read the press, something like that, you had to buy a newspaper, go on the laptop and search for it. Now you open up Instagram, there’s 5 million people that have an opinion about you all of a sudden. Even though when people say they don’t care, they still read it. In the back of their mind, they’re aware of it. So I think that is a massive difference.”

You call this weather?

It is not unusual for Melbourne weather to befuddle tourists but the past fortnight has been particularly bizarre.

The smoke haze has given way to torrential rain which in turn was replaced by mud. Yep, it rained mud. And by next weekend, a couple of scorchers are expected.

Bencic was quizzed about her thoughts on the weather.

“I didn’t know the courts were, like, wet and dirty and all that,” she said. “It was sometimes sunny and then suddenly (it) was almost raining. Then windy. You just kind of have to accept it and go with it and try your best.”

That certainly sounds like Melbourne. When quizzed as to whether she had experienced an event with similar variables to contend with, Bencic was succinct.

“Yes. I played in Hobart,” she said.

Joker cracks the code

Eagle-eyed observers at Melbourne Park over the next week will notice doubles partners often communicate with hand signals. The net player, who is often crouched below the height of the net cord, will make a series of gestures with their fingers.

There was one fascinating example that went to air during the Rally For Relief at Melbourne Park last Wednesday when Rafael Nadal was partnered with Novak Djokovic.

It looked as though the Spaniard was giving the Serbian “the bird”.

Quizzed by doubles legend Todd Woodbridge about it a couple of days later, the seven-time Australian Open winning Djokovic was keen to give a cleaner interpretation.

“Well, I think, you know, you played a lot of doubles, so actually that is a sign that you tend to give to your partner, unintentionally,” he said. “It just means that you’re going to serve to the body of your opponent. But it does look awful.”