Milos Raonic – Canada Fan Blog an (unofficial) blog about tennis and Canadian player Milos Raonic

Sam
June 27th, 2013 - 14:03

Disappointing loss today. While it goes without saying that this has been an unusual Wimbledon thus far with all of the withdrawals and upsets in the first two rounds, this is still an opponent that he should have taken advantage of. I don’t think he played at the net enough and getting into too many baseline rallies resulting in unforced errors. I really liked his play at the French Open following quality shots to the net and putting the pressure on the opponent to make a difficult passing shot. I suppose he just did not have enough quality shots to followup. His inside out forehand let him down a few times. The commentator said it best that he seemed to be making too many errors on shots where he was just trying to move Sijsling around the court. Those are the types of errors that need to be reduced. Sijsling played very well and definitely deserved the victory today, but Milos was not at his best, nor has he been throughout the grass court season (Thank goodness its a short part of the schedule).

He really missed an opportunity near the end of the second set to break when he had Sijsling down 0-40. He really needed to dig deep and get the break in that situation. He cannot win if he is losing 74% of the opponents second serves no matter how well he is serving. These are parts of his game I feel like he can address by the heart of the hard court season now that he has a little bit more time to work with his coach between tournaments through the coming weeks.

What I am more worried about for him is his mindset when he falls behind. Several times he had to hold himself back from smashing his racket, at least one when you just have to tip your cap to your opponent for making a nice shot. It seems like he loses his composure after falling behind and this is not a good quality for someone to be breaking into the top 10. All it takes is one big win where he breaks through despite some poor play. That would give him the confidence to know he can win when he falls behind. Let’s hope this does not continue to be an issue for him in the future and that the hard court season is more kind to him than grass. He’s going to have a difficult time bringing his ranking up for the US Open while defending two quarterfinal appearances leading up to the final grand slam.

Unfortunately the second round was not too kind for the Canadian men with all three of them losing. Let’s hope Eugenie Bouchard can make up for that with a nice run into the second week.