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MUTUA MADRID OPENMay 5, 2019Alexander ZverevMadrid, Spain THE MODERATOR: Do we have any questions for Sascha in English? Q. What do you like in Madrid? What is for you the most special thing of this tournament? ALEXANDER ZVEREV: I mean, the venue. The venue is very special. We have the three courts with the roof - it's almost like an indoor event. A lot of space, a lot of things that, you know -- usually when we go to tennis tournaments, a combined event, we don't have a lot of practice courts, here we do. And it's a pretty well-run tournament. Q. You are coming from your best season. You couldn't make it through the quarterfinals at home. But you play well here, you defend the title. Do you feel like Madrid could be like an inflection point for the year for you? ALEXANDER ZVEREV: Yes, I thought I played okay in Munich. I thought the match there I lost, I had two match points and it could have gone both ways. But I think he's winning the final now easily, something like that, and he's playing very good and, in Barcelona, I didn't play my best. I played a bad match. And in Munich I got to say that of course I didn't play my best tennis, and I still could have won, but it was not a bad match in any way. So I'm happy with how things are improving. I'm happy I'm starting to play better and starting to feel more confidence and I think every week that I play is going to get better and better. Q. When they won their first Grand Slam, Chang was 17, Wilander 18, Safin 20. Do you think it is still possible to win a Grand Slam before the age of 20 now? ALEXANDER ZVEREV: Tough. Very, very tough. I don't see anybody doing it in the next few years. But yet tennis has changed, it is much more physical. It is much faster. It's very different. So, now you really have to have a man body to kind of compete at the highest level and to win at the Grand Slam level. And it is tough to do when you are 17, 18-years-old. You are still developing. Even me, I'm 22-years-old, I'm still developing, so, yeah, I don't see anybody doing that in the near future. Q. How do you feel about the crowd here in Madrid? ALEXANDER ZVEREV: To me, they've always been good. I won the tournament here, so, I like it, I like everything about it. Also playing here, the conditions are nice. And the stadium court is always very special and yeah, I'm looking forward to being out on court again. Q. You said that you had some personal problems. Do you think that without these problems you would be playing your best level of tennis? ALEXANDER ZVEREV: I'd definitely be playing better than I was this year, yes. But, as I said, it's kind of all going to the side now and now I can think about tennis again because as a 21-year-old, everything that I have done in my life was always focussed on tennis, was based on tennis. And all of a sudden, over the past four or five months, tennis was never secondary, but all of a sudden before the practice I have to think about other things, I have to practice, I have to think about other things. And of course it's distracting. It was a new thing for me and I didn't know how to react, how to respond to that. But it was good that I have been through it. It's a learning experience as well. Those things happen in life. And yeah, but everything is coming together now and everything is starting to be more quiet and now I can finally be 100 percent a tennis player again and not a manager, a lawyer and five different other things. That takes your time away. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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