In tennis, the result of a game depends on the finest of margins. When two professional athletes compete with each other at the tennis court, it really gets difficult to judge who the better player is. When the competition is between players of the top level, both have the ability to hit the ball harder than the other. Both can run equally quick and in terms of playing skills, all the professional players seem to be as great as one can be.
The results of most of the games depend on a handful of crucial moments. Even though both players on court seem to be of the same level, usually one player ends up winning the contest. This particular aspect of tennis seems evident during the matches of Daniil Medvedev.
Irrespective of the score line, sometimes it gets really tough to decide if the Russian plays better or worse than his opponents. It seems Medvedev doesn’t do anything special while at the court. In fact, he simply serves the ball as smoothly that it’s highly probable to land inside the boundary line even if he kept his eyes closed. His monotonous ground strokes would certainly make any machine envy the Russian tennis player’s discipline.
However, that shouldn’t have been a matter to worry for Kei Nishikori. The final at Tokyo seemed to witness Nishikori’s triumph. He had been consistently playing well throughout the season. He had been waiting for long to lift a major trophy. It was in 2016, that he won a title for the last time. Nishikori badly wished that the odds to be in his favour, at least during the final. Even on papers, Nishikori could defeat Medvedev by a huge margin, as his extensive shot-making ability made Nishikori a favourite to win the Japan Open.
But things don’t really go according to the plan. No one would have imagined Nishikori to find himself stuck into a rut throughout the match. He couldn’t get his inner beast to roar, especially when it was needed the most. When opportunities knocked on his doors, Nishikori messed up everything by committing repeated errors. The Russian athlete seemed to have appeared in the final with some sort of voodoo tactics that outwitted the local favourite. Medvedev won almost every big point he could, which made the difference in terms of the match result. Daniel Medvedev stunned Kei Nishikori 6-2, 6-4 in straight sets.
