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BARCLAYS DUBAI TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS


February 28, 2009


Rik De Voest

Dmitry Tursunov


DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

DE VOEST-TURSUNOV/Damm-Lindstedt
4-6, 6-3, 1-0


Q. First week together?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: Yes.

Q. Good start.
DMITRY TURSUNOV: Well, it's purely physical (laughing).
RIK DE VOEST: No, just last week I was in Marseilles and I was asking Dmitry if he wanted to play doubles in Dubai. And yeah, we decided that we would get in and we would try, and I guess it ended up being a good partnership.

Q. Any plans to continue, or will you go your separate ways?
RIK DE VOEST: I guess Dmitry normally plays with Igor Kunitsyn, and I normally play with Ashley Fisher. So if we are not playing together again with other partners, then we might play again.

Q. After that first set, what did you tell each other something?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: I told him he sucks, and he told me the same thing. That was the first thing. (Laughter).
RIK DE VOEST: Seems to work.
No, I guess we just had a lot of chances in the first set, love-40s and stuff. And they played one big game to break us and we eventually broke back, and knew that we could break them. So it was just a case of making a lot of shots.
Even from yesterday, we were down in the second break and came back and won.
So Dmitry hits the ball pretty hard, and anything is possible with his racquet, so you're never out of it when he's playing.

Q. Was there anything that you were targeting?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: Targeting? The blue court. (Laughter).

Q. Any of their weaknesses?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: To be honest, I've never played Martin Damm, so I don't know how he played.
Robert Linstedt I've played a few times, and he seems like he can either play really well or he can play really bad, and you never know what he's going to do. And today, he came out in the first game, it was love-40 and we had two good returns. But he had actually very good first three serves and then, you know, four second serves at 170 -- sorry; 180, 190, so that's really not much you can do.
So there's really not much you can do when the person starts thinking that he's Roger Federer out there. (Laughter) You just have to go with the flow and hope that he's going to stop making good shots and start making some errors, which is what happened I think.
I think it he got a little bit more tight towards the end of the second, and then it the tiebreak, and it worked for us.

Q. First time in Dubai?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: I was here last year, but nobody knew I was here because I lost the first round.
RIK DE VOEST: First time. First time ever even contemplated about it.
DMITRY TURSUNOV: Last week he came up and he said -- he's calculated all of these in and outs, and basically there was nobody else who would be able to sign up other than us, and so ...

Q. You were the only guy willing to say yes.
RIK DE VOEST: He had the higher ranking, and I wasn't going to get in unless I had a guy ranked. And it kind of worked out that I had to play with a guy ranked 30 or lower, and Dmitry was the only guy available. So I was lucky he said yes.
DMITRY TURSUNOV: I was still single at the time.

Q. Have you ever played in sand before?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: French Open. But it's definitely not the best conditions, actually. I don't know how the singles are going to turn out, because it's probably not the best way to breathe air right now.

Q. Is it quickening up a bit out there?
RIK DE VOEST: I thought so.
DMITRY TURSUNOV: I can't really say. People ask me, you know, is this court faster or slower, and I can't even tell the speed between clay and grass; so for me, it's the same.
But definitely it throws you off a little because when the ball bounces, there's like a little dust cloud that comes up and it's pretty cool. All of the sand people everything and come out.

Q. Where do you go after this?
DMITRY TURSUNOV: We were playing Davis Cup, so I'm going to Romania Monday.
RIK DE VOEST: I go to South Africa, yeah.
THE MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you.

End of FastScripts




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