The Telegraph
“I will just have to park that and go again”, said the British No1 Dan Evans, after a chastening 6-2, 6-1 defeat at the hands of Stefanos Tsitsipas had brought his career-best run in Monte Carlo to a slightly deflating end. Evans admitted that he had been “outclassed” by the relentless Tsitsipas, who pummelled winners from all angles while also knowing exactly how to counteract Evans’s favourite ploys. But Evans was still proud of his run to the semi-finals of the Rolex Monte Carlo Masters – as indeed he should be, when you consider that no Briton had reached the last four of a Masters 1000 event since Andy Murray’s last great season of 2016. The peak was clearly Evans’s victory over world No.1 Novak Djokovic on Thursday. But he also eliminated three other strong players in Dusan Lajovic, Hubert Hurkacz and David Goffin. He took a slightly different approach in each match, making up for his relative lack of size and power with enormous tactical acuity – until Tsitsipas put a stop to that with an almost faultless display on Saturday. Evans’ gutsy efforts this week were all the more praiseworthy because he had arrived in Monte Carlo on a streak of four agonising defeats in a row – all of them close and all on hard courts, which usually suit his game better. As it happened, though, he found that the lack of expectation on clay – a surface on which he had previously won only two tour-level matches in his entire career – helped to loosen his arm. “Maybe at the grand slams, on the hard [courts], I've been putting a bit too much pressure on myself,” said Evans, who will match his career-best ranking of No.26 when the next chart comes out on Monday. “When I come out on the clay, I'm more focused on my game and trying to get that right, then the result comes. There's things to take onto the grass and the hard from this week definitely.” One other admirable feature of Evans’s 2021 has been his refusal – in contrast to so many of his peers – to bemoan the difficulties caused by the pandemic. “I've not been home since before Australia [in early January], but I'm really enjoying being out and playing matches,” said Evans, who will team up with a new coach next week in Argentina’s Sebastian Prieto. “Wearing a mask is not such a big thing. We've not really had lockdowns or whatnot. We've been lucky in a sense. “It's really helped playing doubles with Neal [Skupski], to have a good friend here. I’ve got my girlfriend [Aleah] with me too. There's been a lot of issues in the world, and it's been nice to be able to forget about it.”
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