Players normally meet each other for the first time while in battle on-court or in locker rooms around the world, but in the third round of the Madrid Open two online friends will stare each other down after years of playing PlayStation on the same side. On Saturday, Daniil Medvedev reached the third round with a 6-4, 6-3 win over Andrea Vavassori and he will face Alexander Shevchenko next.
“I know him really well,” said Medvedev, the second seed. “It’s funny because before I knew him in real life, we played PlayStation together with our friends for six years in the same team, the same game.”
After years of working together while playing Rainbow Six, they did not meet until the ATP Cup in January 2022, when Medvedev drafted Shevchenko in at the last minute to replace Russian players after a Covid outbreak in the team. “I texted him, ‘Do you wanna come’? He made a visa for Australia in one or two days. [It was] the first time he flew over to the continent, he was in the middle seat, and he had to quarantine for 48 hours with the test and everything.”
Medvedev has a difficult challenge against Shevchenko, a talented young player ranked 96th who pulled off a surprise 6-1, 6-1 win over Jiri Lehecka, but he has started his clay season positively.
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After falling out of the top 10, Medvedev concluded his spring hardcourt revival by winning his fourth title in five tournament weeks at the Miami Open. Whether he can find a way to compete for the biggest tournaments on clay remains one of the biggest questions of his career. Still, he remains brutally honest about his relationship with the surface.
“Until a certain point of my career, even on Challenger level, I didn’t think I was bad on clay. I had my first ATP 500 win on clay, against [Jan-Lennard] Struff, it was an amazing match. I had some good wins later in my career,” he said. “It’s just that at one moment I found something on hard courts that I managed to win so many titles, a grand slam, which I didn’t have in juniors and which I can’t find on clay still. So that’s why now I don’t like clay; on hard courts I found something but on clay I didn’t.”
Meanwhile, Mirra Andreeva continued to blaze through the draw as she defeated 17th seed Magda Linette 6-3, 6-3 to reach the fourth round on her 16th birthday. Andreeva will next face 2nd seed Aryna Sabalenka. Cameron Norrie moved into the second round with a 6-4, 7-6(5) win over Yosuke Watanuki. He will be the only British player in round three after Dan Evans fell 6-3, 6-2 to Bernabé Zapata Miralles.
