A powerful serve and a great return game. The ability to play almost gratuitously long rallies. A backhand of laughable consistency. World-class court coverage.
These seem like a package of attributes that would produce a fine — or better than fine — clay court player. Yet Daniil Medvedev was a jarring counterexample for most of the last several clay swings. His flat strokes don’t take advantage of the high bounce the red dirt offers and are sometimes fairly low-margin, but an equally big if not more pressing issue has been Medvedev’s mentality.
In many of his losses on clay, he fails to go down while playing good tennis. His easy shot reproduction can disappear, often replaced with impatient, risky forehands aimed at the lines. Medvedev’s thoughts seem scrambled when he’s losing ground in a match on clay. He gripes with the umpire, he swings his racket at the surface. He offers sound bites that appear all over social media (usually from the middle of a match he lost, of course). He swats at courtside plants.
But it would appear now that Medvedev is slowly figuring out his nemesis that is the clay court, or is at least ready to grapple with figuring it out. The world number two broke his dismal four-match losing streak at Roland-Garros this year by beating the unpredictable yet sometimes deadly Alexander Bublik in the opening round.
In his next match, Medvedev played his most convincing match on clay yet in 2021 by defeating Tommy Paul 3-6, 6-1, 6-4, 6-3. Though Paul’s level dropped considerably in the second set, Medvedev’s response to losing the first was consistent with a player looking to go as deep in a tournament as they possibly could, not with his frustrated persona of Madrid and Rome.
Medvedev’s tennis only got more encouraging after the lopsided second frame. At love-40 on Paul’s serve in the first game of the third set, the two played a brutal 27-shot rally, ending when Medvedev hit long from an offensive position. While the Russian lost the point, he benefitted from it more than Paul, whose first round match extended all the way to 10-8 in the fifth set and is not as accustomed to purely attritional rallies as Medvedev (who went on to break serve in the game).
At 3-all, 30-all on Paul’s serve in the third set, the American served and volleyed behind a great wide delivery. He feathered a good drop volley short in the deuce court, but Medvedev raced all the way from behind the baseline on the ad court to reach the ball, then poked a crosscourt backhand past Paul. Medvedev’s sprint was almost as long as a singular run can get in a point of tennis.
Medvedev is so effective as a player (on hard courts) in part due to the fact that his best tennis simultaneously makes use of several finely tuned factors. He needs to be serving well, he needs to be putting the vast majority of his shots between the singles lines — whether he’s standing still or on the dead run — and he has to find the balance between running his opponent around and standing way behind the baseline. If any of these factors are even slightly off — his serving, his court positioning, his accuracy — Medvedev’s entire game can and often does suffer as a result. He is still searching for the ideal balance on clay, but his last two matches are the best indication he is moving in the right direction he has had in years.
The match with Paul wasn’t particularly competitive in the end. The result started to feel inevitable even before Medvedev picked up a second break in the fourth set. And it didn’t seem like Medvedev’s improved results were because of a radical technical change — it was more that he was prepared for the fight. Prepared to possibly fall behind, and ready to grind through those endless rallies to get back on even terms once he did.
The value of this improved preparation is difficult to quantify for Medvedev. There are still several far better clay-courters on the ATP. But when considering his bundle of talents in conjunction with the willingness to suffer, it is clear just how much adversity his opponents will need to be prepared for when playing him.
Medvedev is currently #2 in the ATP rankings — a testament to his trophy haul on hard courts when one considers he has achieved very little on clay or grass since 2019 (though to be fair, he didn’t have the chance on grass in 2020 with Wimbledon’s cancellation). He has made appearances in two major finals. It has been clear that his next step is developing more surface versatility for some time. He has failed time and again in previous clay seasons. But now, even if he loses to Reilly Opelka in the next round of Roland-Garros, Medvedev has finally made a bright start in this endeavor.