In a fresh controversy at Wimbledon, Feliciano Lopez was involved in a squabble with his opponent Fabio Fognini’s coach Jose Perlas on Friday.
According to Sport360, Perlas allegedly called Lopez “the dirtiest guy I’ve seen in 20 years” during the encounter. This spurred the Spaniard, who retorted saying: “This never happened to me in 20 years that the coach of my opponent insulted me during the match.”
Lopez, later, had a few words to convey to Fognini during the post-match handshake before he lashed out towards the latter’s box where Perlas was sitting. Subsequently, the chair umpire was forced to intervene as he ushered the Spaniard back to his chair.
“There’s nothing wrong between me and Fabio, it’s just that his coach, all of a sudden, when I won the third set, he just said something to me, in Spanish, something very rude. I don’t know why,” Lopez explained afterwards.
“And then I was telling Fabio that this shouldn’t be possible. ‘What’s wrong with your coach that he is going that way to me all of a sudden?’ Because nothing happened between me and Fabio?” he added.
It was, however, Lopez who had the last laugh as he rallied from two sets down to pull off a thrilling 3-6 6-7 6-3 6-3 6-3 win over his Italian counterpart.
#Lopez pic.twitter.com/bKt6QFGkMx
— doublefault28 (@doublefault28) July 1, 2016
