Tsitsipas<\/a>, who decided to play in Munich this year instead of \u200chis usual tour stop in Barcelona, knows that the more his ranking slides the tougher his opponents will be in the early stages of tournaments.<\/p>\n“I’m aware that I \u200cmight need to play good players in earlier \u2060rounds at different tournaments this year,” \u200che told Tennis TV ahead of the ATP 500 tournament.<\/p>\n
“It’s not an easy \u200bthing to get to play them early, but I also accept the challenge and I accept my current position and state, \u200bthat these things need to happen in order for me to get back to where I belong.”<\/p>\n
Tsitsipas showed plenty of potential when he broke \u2060through eight years ago \u200bbut since reaching the finals of the French Open in 2021 and Australian Open in 2023 he has struggled to deliver a sustained run of form.<\/p>\n
A niggling back injury derailed the second half of his 2025 campaign \u200cand while he began this year saying his goal was just to feel competitive again, his only decent run came in Doha where he reached the quarter-finals.<\/p>\n
Questions have been asked about his professionalism, with Goran Ivanisevic, who coached him in 2025, saying after the Greek’s first-round exit at Wimbledon last year that he had not seen a more “unprepared player” in his life.<\/p>\n
Before Munich, Tsitsipas said he would consider playing more ATP 250 tournaments to regain his rhythm. The Geneva Open is the only tournament \u200cat that level ahead of Roland Garros, which begins on May 24.<\/p>\n
“I’m \u200ba player that needs matches, I’m a player that needs to \u200cplay a lot of sets to feel my game better, and this is something I might need to do in the next couple of weeks,” he added.<\/p>\n
“I’m expecting to play a lot of tournaments, I want to get a lot of tournaments under my \u2060belt, but of course be careful \u2060where I choose my tournaments \u200cand when I get to play.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stefanos Tsitsipas walked off the court in Munich on Wednesday after another first-round defeat that highlighted \u2060how far…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-610920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}