Andrey Rublev: ‘I lost them matches because of myself. I couldn’t handle the pressure’

A s yet another enormous opportunity rapidly slipped from his grasp in the US Open quarter-final against Frances Tiafoe last summer, a distraught Andrey Rublev slumped down in his chair and cried into his towel.

The match wasn’t even over, but Rublev was all too familiar with how these events normally end. Despite his considerable achievements, from being a permanent fixture inside the top 10, to 11 ATP titles at the time and an Olympic gold medal, his career, in his mind, was also defined by what had evaded him. Rublev had contested seven grand slam quarter-finals and two Masters 1000 finals before this spring, losing every single one.

“Those matches were really, really disappointing to me because in the end, I lost them because of myself,” Rublev says in an interview with the Guardian. “I felt that I had chances to be in the semis but I couldn’t handle the pressure. I couldn’t even play. I was not playing because of my emotions. In the end, of course I was disappointed a lot. It took me a while to recover.”

Rublev has found great success due to a metronomic attacking baseline game centred around finding his forehand and relentlessly unloading on the stroke until the ball doesn’t come back. His inability to pair his game with variety has proved limiting against the very best, but by far his biggest obstacle has been his head.

While Rublev is kind and soft-spoken off the court, he can be volatile in the heat of battle. The world No 6 inflicts the worst of his anger on himself, from berating his own play to more concerning outbursts like punching his strings until his knuckles graze and drawing blood from striking himself with his racket.

“In the end, I wanted it so badly that I couldn’t handle the pressure during the