Daniil Medvedev raised his eyebrows, swung his head to one side and mouthed “boring”. Tennis Australia president Jayne Hrdlicka was in the middle of her presentation speech, and listening politely to niceties was not a trick left in his playbook, which had already been sucked dry by the Spaniard standing next to him. It was peak Medvedev. Sore loser? Not really. He likely would have said the same thing even if he had won. Truculence is in his DNA – but not because he is Russian.
The stereotyping of Medvedev is still very much alive. For years he has been cast as the “pantomime villain”, the maverick with a hint of crazy in his eyes. This past fortnight all manner of adjectives have been attached to his name in the arenas and on the airwaves. Even the “Russian devil” has somehow seen the light of day, a troubling trope that says more about the mouths from which it came than it does the player himself.
Medvedev would probably lament that typecasting of this nature is a sign of a “low IQ”. It might also just be easier to quantify complex characters prone to colourful behaviour by putting them into a little box labelled “bad guy”. Had he outlasted the indefatigable Rafael Nadal and been crowned Australian Open champion – and stopped the “good guy” Nadal from making history – he would now also be confirmation bias personified.
In reality, the world No 2 is many things. Unorthodox and tempestuous, intensely confident with the talent to match. And also a contradiction of himself, both unflustered and agitated, calculated and over-emotional. He alienates his audience and in the next breath wins them back over. He tells a chair umpire – without a hint of irony – that he is a “a small cat”, and then apologises profusely. Informs the home crowd he will only watch the start of Ash Barty’s women’s final because it clashes with his dinner plans, then clarifies he will stream it on his mobile phone.
Some of his more outrageous moments are visceral eruptions in the heat of the battle. On this particular night he boiled over in the fourth set. Nadal’s momentum had reached a crescendo and whenever Medvedev won a point you could hear a pin drop. When he lost one you could hear him, barking directives at chair umpire John Blom to quieten the chaos. “Can you take control, please? A small ‘please’ is not enough,” he demanded. “Step up. It’s the final of a grand slam. With idiots, ‘please’ doesn’t work.”
Last week he admitted he “can get really emotional”. “I have been working on it,” he said. “I think if we look back at myself five years ago when I started playing there was less attention on me, but I was just insanely crazy.”
But there is sometimes also a sense he knows exactly what he is doing, his craftiness communicated via that mischievous twinkle in his eye. Like after his quarter-final when, having fought back from two sets and a match point down to defeat Felix Auger-Aliassime, he revealed in his on-court interview he had asked himself “what would Novak do?” He stirs the pot, and revels in the reaction.
On Sunday against Nadal, when he won a tightly contested second set, the boos and cheers came in equal measure. He simply spread his arms wide and beckoned for more. He hit a sitter of a drop shot into the net, was greeted by applause, then clapped his racket in sarcastic thanks. Living for the theatre.
Thus it really had been no bother when he first walked out on to Rod Laver Arena to boos (not “siuus”). There were cheers, too, but the reception was decidedly lukewarm. Nadal had the masses in his pocket from the off, and he did not care one bit.
Back at the 2019 US Open the villain motif was in full swing when, during his third-round defeat of Feliciano López he endured almost two hours of relentless booing and responded with: “I want all of you to know when you sleep tonight, I won because of you. The more you do this, the more I will win for you guys.”
A few days later he played Nadal in the Flushing Meadows final, another brutal five-setter – when Nadal took a two-set lead – which doubled as an unlikely resurrection in the popularity stakes. The mutual respect clearly remained in this even longer rematch.
“I want to congratulate Rafa because what he did today, it was insane,” he said. “I tried during the match just to play tennis, but after the match I ask him, ‘are you tired?’. I think the level was very high. You raised your level after two sets for the 21st grand slam.”
Before this final Medvedev, 26 in mid-February, was the only man the whole tournament to have come back from two sets to love down to win a match. Nadal, in his heavily compromised physical state, should not have lasted the distance against the body up the other end. Medvedev’s is a gangly, willowy thing. One could fold him up like a pair of trousers and slip him into a drawer. But he is as powerful as he is elastic, with a serve that topped out at 214km/h (133mph) and a hard, flat backhand Novak Djokovic says is “strong as a wall”.
At odds with his outbursts he is also a cerebral player, befitting somebody who excelled at physics and mathematics in school – he has credited both with helping him develop analytical skills fit for tennis. Mats Wilander describes him as a “chess player on a tennis court”.
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Opponents do not like playing against him because he is famously hard to read. His only predictable quality is that he is unpredictable. A smiling assassin who gets inside your head and gives nothing away in return. He wanted a second grand slam title – he won the US Open in September – and would use his unpredictability until the very end. Once he had reached it the game was up. Nadal served. He swiped at the net, hit one long, copped an ace, then found himself overcome by a winner – in every sense of the word.
After the pandemonium, during that “boring” speech, he chatted and joked with Nadal. When he spoke he was disarming. The crowd love it. Again, somehow, he had won them back. Little did they know he was still scheming. “Last but not least, I just wanted to thank …” they waited for their acknowledgment. He paused, then said: “… my team again. Thank you, guys.”