WATCH: “They would have disqualified Djokovic” Furious Andrey Rublev almost hits court sweeper, gets away with a warning after on-court tantrum
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Andrey Rublev
7th seed Andrey Rublev had a rather tough first-round outing at the 2022 French Open where he was pushed by Korean Soonwoo Kwon. The Russian eventually won the match in 4 sets 6-7(5),6-3,6-2,6-4 to reach the second round of the tournament. Rublev was the pre-match favorite but Kwon played some brilliant tennis to frustrate the 7th seed.
Not being able to breach the Korean defense was getting in Rublev’s head in the first set and he was visibly very angry with himself. Despite playing a very clean tie-break, he lost it, and that frustrated him even more. After losing the set, during the change of ends, Rublev exchanged a few words with the chair umpire.
He then smashed the ball in anger which bounced back dangerously and almost took out a court sweeper. Rublev had hit the sweepers’ cap which fell off on the court. As a natural reaction, he was received with a lot of boos from the crowd which frustrated him even more. He then lost his cool and started smashing his racquet. He eventually broke his racquet only to get a warning from the chair umpire.
The dangerous part here is the way in which Rublev smashed the ball. It could’ve easily hit the sweeper’s face instead of the cap which would’ve resulted in an immediate disqualification like in Novak Djokovic’s case at the 2020 US Open.
Twitter compares Andrey Rublev’s brain fade moment to that of Novak Djokovic
Over social media, fans compared Andrey Rublev’s incident to that of Novak Djokovic from the US Open a couple of years ago. Djokovic got disqualified from the US Open that year for nudging a lines judge.
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Lakshya Chopra
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