“I don’t think his hands are that good” Casper Ruud receives mid-match advice from teammate Alexander Zverev during the 2021 Laver Cup
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Casper Ruud and Alexander Zverev
The 2021 Laver Cup kickstarted in the TD Garden in Boston where Casper Ruud from Team Europe and Reilly Opelka from Team World began this year’s proceedings. Roger Federer, founder and an active player of the Laver Cup for the past 3 editions surprised everyone with an unannounced visit in the arena for the tournament that brought even more excitement during the match.
The Laver Cup is famous for the star-studded lineup it gets and players who are otherwise rivals for the season become teammates for the 3 days and are seen coaching and instructing each other during the matches. Roger Federer had received quite a few instructions from Rafael Nadal in the previous edition, which not many would have expected to happen.
Following the trend, this time it was the Olympics Gold medallist and World No. 4 Alexander Zverev who passed some instructions to Casper Ruud during his match with Opelka. The incident took place during the break between game 7 and game 8 in the 2nd set when Casper was leading 6-3, 4-3 in the match.
“If he goes to the net, it doesn’t matter. Let him get a normal volley because I don’t think his hands are that good where he can push a lot. He wants to finish it straight away, you know what I mean,” said Zverev with his instructions caught by the mics.
Team Europe leads Team World 3-1 after the end of action on Day-1
With Casper winning the 1st match, Matteo Berrettini and Andrey Rublev picked up wins against Felix-Auger Aliassime and Diego Schwartzman in 3-sets to take a 3-0 lead going into the final match of the day where the pair of John Isner and Denis Shapovalov got the better of Alexander Zverev and Matteo Berrettini to finish the day with Team Europe leading the scoreboard 3-1.
While the matches won on Day-1 gave 1 point, victories on Day-2 will give the teams 2 points for every win, something to reassure Team World as they need only 1 win to level the scores with Team Europe.
Also Read: Laver Cup 2021: Order of play for Saturday, 25th September 2021
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Sarthak Shitole
(3462 Articles Published)