Daniil Medvedev believes positives can be drawn from his recent performances at the Masters 1000 events and is confident he can compete with the best in the world.
The former world No.1 is set to enter Roland Garros seeded outside the top 10 for the first time since 2019. So far this season, he has played 11 Tour-level matches on the clay and has won eight of them. He reached the third round of the Monte Carlo Masters (losing to Alex de Minaur), the quarter-finals in Madrid (losing to Casper Ruud) and the fourth round of Rome (losing to Lorenzo Musetti). In comparison, heading into last year’s French Open, he had a win-loss record of 6-3.
“To be honest, it’s not bad, in the sense that I have a game, I had good wins,” Medvedev said of his recent performance during an interview with Bolshe.
“All the matches I won were against good clay court players, and I lost to players who were in very good shape.
“Naturally, the big downside is that if you want to get back into the top 5, you need to beat them. But all this can happen at any moment, so you need to keep working. They say that if you take my game over the last two or three years, I play almost better on clay than on hard.”
Medvedev has experienced mixed fortunes at the French Open, where he lost in the first round in his first four appearances. However, in recent years, he has made progress at the event with runs to the quarter-finals in 2021, followed by reaching the fourth round twice in 2022 and 2024.
However, the 29-year-old is currently ranked 12th in the world and could potentially face a tricky opponent earlier in the draw compared to his recent appearances. A challenge he is ready to face.
“If you look at my matches in 2021-2022, my game was still built primarily on counterattacks, especially on the return,” he explained.
“I feel that I am close to finding things on clay that will help me on other surfaces, will return me to the desired level. Therefore, I am very happy with the game that I show on clay. All that remains is to beat the top players on clay with this game, which are Musetti, Ruud and such players.”
The French Open draw will take place on Thursday, 22 May at 1pm BST. Medvedev is making his ninth main draw appearance at the event.
NOTE: Quotes via Championat and translated into English.
