Andrey Rublev admits this is the hungriest he’s ever been on a tennis court, and it shows.
The 22-year-old Russian enters his fourth round against Alexander Zverev on Monday carrying a 15-match winning streak that includes back-to-back title runs in Doha and Adelaide prior to his march to the last 16 in Melbourne this fortnight.
Rublev hasn’t lost a singles match since the Paris Masters last October, and is 11-0 in 2020.
He is the first man since Dominik Hrbaty in 2004 to win two titles in the opening two weeks of the season, and is surfing a wave of confidence that is moving as fast as his stunning racquet head speed.
“He loves tennis and he wants to be the best, and he’s working for that. It’s his dream. You cannot keep it out, sometimes he is thinking too big but you cannot take it down. I cannot do that,” his Spanish coach Fernando Vicente told ausopen.com.
A lower back stress fracture sidelined Rublev for three months in 2018, and a right wrist injury forced him to miss the French Open last year. He’s now playing with this fire burning inside him, like he’s trying to make up for lost time.
“When Andrey was injured, you cannot stop this guy from practicing. They told him, ‘You can’t play tennis because you need to rest like four weeks’. He couldn’t do it, after one week he was playing against the wall,” his compatriot Evgeny Donskoy said during Davis Cup last November.
Vicente relayed similar sentiments.
“If you tell him to have a weekend off, he starts to stress also because he wants to work, he doesn’t want to waste time,” said Vicente, who is a former top-30 player.
“Sometimes he doesn’t realise that you have to stop, you have to take a break to become more fresh. He just loves tennis.”
Ranked a career-high 16 in the world, Rublev is one of three Russian men in the top 20, alongside Daniil Medvedev and Karen Khachanov – the first time this has happened since Marat Safin, Nikolay Davydenko and Mikhail Youzhny were in the top 20 in 2005.
Rublev first exploded onto the scene when he won his first ATP title in Umag in 2017, as a 19-year-old lucky loser, then made the US Open quarterfinals a few weeks later, upsetting the likes of Grigor Dimitrov and David Goffin along the way.
He made his way back to the second week of a Grand Slam at the US Open last September, shortly after shocking Roger Federer en route to the Cincinnati quarterfinals. Rublev cryptically refers to a stressful issue that was resolved during that week in Ohio and from then on, he flew.
“After I took out one stress I had in the past, in Cincinnati, I started to enjoy much more, I started to have motivation to practice so much, I started to get the feeling I want to compete badly, I want to perform better and better, I feel like I don’t want to stop practicing,” Rublev told reporters after his Australian Open first round win over Christopher O’Connell last week.
“And yes, now I’m the hungriest I’ve ever been. Of course I was hungry in the past as well, and I was working so hard, but that one thing that was stressing me was stopping me and I knew that as soon as I figured it out, it will help me. But during that moment it was stopping me and was destroying me inside.”
Rublev won his first title in two years on home soil in Moscow last October and went undefeated in singles at Davis Cup to help guide Russia to the semifinals.
Now he is playing like he simply cannot lose.
Rublev insists he is never thinking about his winning streak when he is on the court battling, but his coach assures his charge is well aware of what is at stake, and is learning to embrace the pressure.
“The pressure is there, he wants to be one of the top players in the world and you are working to play these rounds,” said Vicente.
“The best way to do it is to face it, to understand what you’re going to face on court and that’s all. I understand that he is tight in some moments, because he has fears like everybody, but this is the only way to jump to this level.”
Rublev feels that the biggest lesson he has learned so far is acceptance. He had a difficult first half of 2019, but accepted whatever was thrown his way and managed to turn things around in the second half of the season.
He often describes himself as “going crazy” on court, and admits his main goal is to keep improving his mentality. Keeping his emotions in check is not something that comes naturally to him, but it’s what he is working on the most. The hard work in that department is obviously paying off.
“He feels crazy, sometimes yes,” said Vicente. “But obviously after his past injuries he realised how he needs to behave on the court. The way he is behaving is not bad, it’s good, because he is always fighting, but he needs to try to waste a little less energy and when he’s complaining, he’s not playing better.
“So I prefer if he destroys one racquet and keep playing and not complain every single time he makes one mistake. But the real thing is we are working on this, he knows it’s one of the points to improve, and he’s doing better.
“When you are young, you want to go fast, you want to … it happened with all the players in the past. If you compare how [Rafael] Nadal and others were, they were so pumped at the beginning, then over the years they kept calm, and understood the situation better. Andrey is on the way.”
Rublev did not have an offseason. He started training immediately after finishing Davis Cup late November, eager to keep working and to get back on the court. Is there any worry that fatigue will catch up with him, especially in these best-of-five Grand Slam matches here in Melbourne?
“He has a big heart, good mobility, he is quite elastic, so I think it’s okay, no problem on this,” Vicente assures.