Daniil Medvedev's adjusted attitude pays off in win over Tommy Paul

“I feel really hopeful,” Daniil Medvedev said after recording his first career win at Roland Garros, which came earlier this week. “You could see it in the match, I’m feeling that here, at least this year, with this weather, with these balls, I can play like on hard courts.”

“Now when I’m coming into the big tournaments feeling like this, I know I’m capable of doing big things.”

To which the tennis world responded: Who even are you?

Was this the same 25-year-old Russian who had spent the spring grousing about how much he hated clay? Kicking the red dirt during his matches and begging chair umpires to default him? Laughing at the idea of being seeded ahead of Rafael Nadal at the French Open? The same guy who had been forced to spend 10 days “lying on the couch” after testing positive for the coronavirus in Monte Carlo, and then had won a total of one match in Madrid and Rome?

Yes, this is the same Daniil Medvedev, and he insists that he isn’t just playing “mind games” to try to convince himself and his opponents that he can play on this surface now. He says that several things have helped brighten his mood over the last couple of weeks.

First, he finally felt fully recovered from the virus.

“I feel like COVID was tough for maybe five, six weeks since I got it,” he said. “Now I feel 100 percent.”

Second, he trained extra hard to make up for the time he lost during his quarantine.

“I was practicing like crazy, a lot of hours.”

Then, when he arrived in Paris, he found that the warm conditions and the lighter Dunlop balls that the tournament uses suited him much better than they had last year, when it took place in colder fall temperatures.

“As soon as I came here, these balls are much lighter,” he said. “They go faster in the air, so that’s why I can make them also drop faster before the baseline.”

Medvedev was as good as his word during his 3-6, 6-1, 6-4, 6-3 second-round win over Tommy Paul on Wednesday. He started slowly and made a slew of errors to go down 2-4. But instead of rolling his eyes or kvetching about the clay, Medvedev made those errors vanish as quickly as they appeared. While Paul took a one-set lead, Medvedev gained the momentum as soon as the second set began. While he did suffer another sudden dip in his level in the middle of the third set, he recovered from it immediately. Medvedev won 80 percent of his first-serve points, hit 30 winners to Paul’s 20, and made made 32 errors to Paul’s 46.

As he said, Medvedev was able to play with the same mix of consistency, forcefulness, and unpredictability that makes him such a riddle on hard courts. His backhand drives penetrated through the court and handcuffed Paul, while the surface’s relative slowness gave him time to use his speed on defense. There was never a good reason why Medvedev couldn’t succeed on clay, and today we saw why.

He may have it tougher in his next match, when he faces Reilly Opelka, an American who has begun to find his own clay legs this spring. But even if Medvedev is still seeded a spot or two too high, he looks like he’ll be a factor in the bottom half. That’s more than he’s ever been at Roland Garros before.