One of the hardest-working me in the game, de Minaur confessed “I’m tired mentally. I’m a little burned out.”
The feisty Aussie said a demanding ATP schedule has drained him and cost him today.
De Minaur called on the ATP to enact a simple solution or face the consequences: Shorten the season or shorten players careers.
“The solution is you shorten it, because what’s going to happen is players’ careers are going to get shorter and shorter because they’re just going to burn out mentally,” de Minaur said. “There’s just too much tennis.
“Look, there’s no excuse, again, for today, myself, what happened today. I need to look at myself in the mirror and find out the reasonings, because ultimately this isn’t going to change. It doesn’t look like it’s going to change. I have to adapt and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The former world No. 17 Bublik hit five of his 12 aces and won 15 of 17 first-serve points in the final set scoring his second straight win over an Aussie after his first-round sweep of James Duckworth.
Seeing his Slam streak of quarterfinals collapse, the ninth-seeded de Minaur joined fourth-seeded Taylor Fritz, seventh-seeded Casper Ruud and No. 11-seeded Daniil Medvedev, who served for the match before bowing to Cameron Norrie in a five-set thriller yesterday, as the fourth Top 11-men’s seed to fall in the first two rounds.
Yesterday, Ruud, hobbled by a left knee injury, hit the “rat race” that is the ATP Tour with a parting shot saying the hectic schedule, ranking points at play and financial penalty if you miss a mandatory event compel players to compete even when they’re injured.
Today, de Minaur echoed Ruud’s remarks suggesting the ATP knows the crammed calendar is an issue but won’t modify it.
“The solution is simple: you shorten the schedule, right?” de Minaur said. “What’s not normal is that for the last three, four years I’ve had two days off after Davis Cup, and I’ve gone straight into pre-season, straight into the new season again. Yeah, sure, I mean, I could have maybe taken a week or a week and a half.
“That means my pre-season is two weeks long and I’m already starting in Australia, which is my home ground where I want to be doing well. Once you start, you don’t finish until November 24th, right? So it’s just never ending. That’s the sheer fact of it.”
