\u201cI received a lot of hate, which is pretty normal because I deserve it. I\u2019ve been behaving pretty badly,\u201d Atmane said. \u201cI was struggling a lot mentally for the past couple of weeks. The season has been very long for me. I was struggling with my mental health, so it hasn\u2019t been easy for me, but I was trying to get a fresh start after this tournament, because Shanghai showed me that this kind of behavior has nothing to do on a tennis court at the highest level.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to deeply apologize to everyone because this is not the type of behavior that I want to show to people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, for the love of the sport, I\u2019m not allowed to do such things. So first off, I want to deeply apologize to everyone because this is not the type of behavior that I want to show to people. I\u2019ve been pretty disappointed in myself, but I\u2019m happy about the people around me who showed me that no matter what, they will love me for who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atmane threw his racket toward the stands during his first qualifying match in Shanghai against Bernard Tomic on October 5. The side barrier stopped it short of the front row and he avoided a default. A few games later he retired, trailing 5-3 in the deciding set. It was his second retirement in less than a week. He had quit at 5-5 in the third set against Elias Ymer at the Jingshan Challenger after leading 5-3.<\/p>\n
The next day, Atmane apologized on social media. He said that his fall from the top 40 to the edge of the top 100 had left him \u201cway more stressed and pressured than I could possibly imagine,\u201d and that he would step back to rebuild. At the time, he put his problems down to physical rather than mental health and said he could not tell whether his season was over. He had reached a career-high No. 41 in April and was still in the top 50 in August.<\/p>\n
The win over Hijikata in Almaty, ranked No. 86, came in their first meeting. It was also Atmane\u2019s first indoor win on the ATP Tour, in his first tournament in Kazakhstan and one of his last four events of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel amazing,\u201d he said. \u201cI never got an indoor win on the ATP Tour, so I\u2019m pretty happy about that. Of course, now that you get one win, you want a second one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atmane will face the winner of the match between seed No. 6 Tomas Martin Etcheverry and Mattia Bellucci.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI received a lot of hate, which is pretty normal because I deserve it. I\u2019ve been behaving pretty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":935280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-935279","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\/935279","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=935279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}