Friendship can be a difficult business in tennis, a point that will not have been lost on Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Shevchenko as they locked horns at the Caja Mágica.
Shevchenko, a 22-year-old qualifier ranked 96th in the world, first met his more celebrated countryman at the beginning of last year, when Medvedev invited him to join Russia’s ATP Cup team after Andrey Rublev and Aslan Karatsev were ruled out with Covid. Yet they were no strangers. United by a shared passion for gaming, they had been virtual friends and team-matesfor six years previously; it was a friendship for the 21st-century, one forged online and played out in pixels.
The earthier realities of clay-court tennis cut through all that in the Manolo Santana stadium, where there was little by way of camaraderie as the first on-court meeting between the pair ended with a 4-6, 6-1, 7-5 victory for Medvedev.
Shevchenko, in red-hod form after seeing off a pair of top-50 players in JJ Wolf and the gifted Czech Jiri Lehecka, began like an express train. Medvedev, never the quickest of starters on a surface that remains his bête noire, looked all at sea as the younger man, playing with an assurance that belied his ranking, ripped forehands and pounded down serves, fist-pumping and bellowing as he went.
Medvedev’s response was characteristically quirky. First he turned botanist, searching around in a courtside flower box for a stray ball. Then, having conceded his serve for a second time to fall 3-0 behind, he muttered something indiscernible in Shevchenko’s direction at the changeover. A warning to tone down the triumphalism, perhaps? Whatever it was, it took the edge off Shevchenko’s gleeful celebrations while doing nothing to quell the excellence of his play.
When he caressed away a drop volley after turning defence to attack with a wonderful defensive lob, going on to hold for 5-1, Shevchenko gestured to the crowd, imploring them to get behind him, to make more noise.
Medvedev, meanwhile, swatted angrily at the court. More than once, he responded to a mistake with a sarcastic thumbs up. Warned by the chair umpire not to spit on the court, he replied: “It’s the nature of the surface.” And when Shevchenko served out the set at the second time of asking, ending a run of three games against him, Medvedev, never one to shirk confrontation, urged on the crowd as they jeered and whistled him.
“Sometimes you deserve it, sometimes not,” said Medvedev, who was also heckled in his matches against Lorenzo Sonego and Alexander Zverev at the Monte Carlo Masters.
“Probably, you know, I hit the racket a little bit, so maybe I deserve it. One time I took a challenge, they started booing. What, you don’t want me to take a challenge?
“I feel like also sometimes the crowd right now in tennis, for whatever reason, I don’t know – maybe it was like this before also – comes for this excitement.
“So as soon as something is happening, they don’t even know what’s happening, they just boo you. I experienced this quite a bit.
“I think it’s just part of tennis right now.”
Medvedev, however, has a history of prospering in such circumstances, and once again he backed up his belligerence with boldness, racing through the second set for the loss of just one game as he dramatically reduced his unforced error count, competed more effectively from the baseline, and capitalised on a diminished serving performance from Shevchenko.
There were still plenty of bumps in the road for the second seed, beginning with a nosebleed that delayed the start of the decider and left him sitting at courtside with a tissue hanging out of his nostril. Many players wouldn’t be seen dead in such a situation; Medvedev, though, scenting victory in spite of his predicament, appeared to have no thought beyond reaching the next round. Forget friendship. For all his gripes about clay, he remains the steeliest of competitors.
Medvedev clawed his way back after Shevchenko, once again celebrating with gusto, broke for 2-0 with a finely executed drop shot, and staged another dramatic act of escapology at 2-4, craftily working his way back into a point he had no right to win to set up a break point. Shevchenko surrendered the opportunity with a tame error, and suffered further heartbreak when Medvedev recovered from 0-40 in the ninth game. As the clock passed the two and a half hour mark, Shevchenko began to cramp. His race was run.
“I don’t know when he started cramping, but he showed it at 5-5. Like 20 minutes, I was already cramping. Just I didn’t show it,” said Medvedev, who opened the European clay-court clay-court swing by reaching the last eight in Monte Carlo.
“I was like, ‘OK, he just came to the tour.’ He shouldn’t show it, because that’s when I’m going to go even harder mentally and physically.
“When you win 7-5 in the third, it’s always mentally a brutal match, so I’m happy that I managed to win it.
“I don’t have a title on clay yet. I really want to make it.”
To keep that ambition on course, Medvedev will need to get past Karatsev, who came through 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 against Australia’s Alex de Minaur. When the pair last played on clay, two years ago at the Rome Masters, Karatsev won in straight sets and Medvedev spent much of the match complaining about the surface. “
“You like to be in the dirt like a dog?” he mused at one changeover. “It’s OK, I don’t judge.”
Stand by for another eventful afternoon.