Richard Gasquet who thinks of his next opponent. – press action / SIPA
At Roland-Garros,
We suspected him of wanting to pass his turn this time, but our favorite Richard of all life just after Richard Virenque and Richard Clayderman is not the man to shy away from the impossible.
Easy winner of Hugo Gaston, the sensation of last year, the Biterrois will be entitled to a seventeenth chance to beat Rafa Nadal once in his life, without anyone having any illusions about the outcome of the fight at come.
“Trying to do better than three years ago”
Even less Richard, who has not taken a set at the Manacor bull since what, 2007, 2008? “It’s a huge frustration in my career to have lost so many times to him, what do you want me to say? I’ve been playing him for 17 years and I’ve never beaten him, that’s how it is ”. But I promise, he won’t go to the Chatrier pulling a six-foot-long face. “It’s a real treat for me to find myself playing it once again here after so many years. Here is the greatest player of all years, it becomes tiring in the long run, but I want to make a great match, I will try to do better than three years ago when I had not been good and I left with regrets of my match ”.
It was in the third round, like in 2005, when tennis fans watched for the first Grand Slam clash between the two most promising players of the moment. Two months after having almost brought him to land in Monte-Carlo, Gasquet had not already existed. “It was 33 degrees, I remember that well. I took 4, 2, and 3, and at the end of the match I said to my father “It’s okay we have the winner of Roland Garros, it’s going to be rubbish”. I didn’t say he was going to win thirteen times, eh, that nobody could imagine ”.
It was a bit that day, too, that we understood that Gasquet would never be of the same caliber, even if the comparison with Nadal haunted “Ritchie” for 15 years. “At first I didn’t experience it that way, but after all, being compared to perhaps the greatest player of all time is flattery, right? “. Not better.