He has no explanation for it, and no precedent.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never felt quite like that,\u201d Auger-Aliassime said. \u201cI\u2019ve had cramps before. I\u2019ve felt, okay, tired towards the end of matches, but in a normal way. This was abnormal a little bit, and there were no signs in the last couple of days and no signs this morning, as well. I\u2019m not sure. I\u2019m going to run some tests and see what comes out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Felix decided to finish rather than retire<\/p>\n
He thought about stopping and talked himself out of it twice. The first time was after the third set, when he still expected the sensation to lift.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thinking maybe I take a break, maybe in 20 minutes I\u2019ll feel better,\u201d he said. \u201cBut obviously it wasn\u2019t the case, and not much you can do. Hydration, supplementation, but then if it doesn\u2019t go away, the guy keeps on winning points, and you have to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second time was in the fourth, by which stage the match was gone. \u201cBy the time it was 3-love, 4-love, I was, like, okay, let\u2019s finish the match, let\u2019s see, but I didn\u2019t want to retire at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n
What the statistics had suggested<\/p>\n
Watched without his account, the match looked like a serving collapse. Auger-Aliassime won 41% of the points behind his second serve, 20 of 49, against 61% for Khachanov. He made 47 unforced errors to 30 and served eight double faults to four. He faced 20 break points, saved 13 and was broken seven times.<\/p>\n
He was asked what his opponent had been doing to make it so one-sided, and refused the premise entirely.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Look, I cannot beat him or anybody in this draw feeling the way I felt today<\/p>\n
\u201cKaren is a great player. Look, I cannot beat him or anybody in this draw feeling the way I felt today,\u201d Auger-Aliassime said. \u201cIf I cannot move, we\u2019re not talking about tennis here. It\u2019s unfortunate. I wish we were talking about tennis. I wish that I was beaten and we were talking about what I could have done better tennis-wise, but it\u2019s not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auger-Aliassime\u2019s next steps are practical. He will go home, see doctors, fitness coaches, physios and nutritionists, and expects the disappointment to take a day or two. He is also still without a coach and said he expects to name one \u201cin the next couple of weeks.\u201d Canada play a Davis Cup tie in Quebec later this month, against France, in his home city.<\/p>\n
The defeat costs him 750 ranking points, the difference between a semi-final and a second round at this tournament.<\/p>\n
The men\u2019s draw has now lost the No. 3 and No. 4 seeds before the third round, along with the Cincinnati champion Arthur Fils, the No. 12 seed Rafael Jodar and Brandon Nakashima, who leads the ATP Tour in hard-court wins this season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He has no explanation for it, and no precedent. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt quite like that,\u201d Auger-Aliassime said. \u201cI\u2019ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":882288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-882287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}