"It’s a situation I don’t want to be in, so I leave": Medvedev's coach Gilles Cervara on leaving box mid match

Gilles Cervara as the coach of Daniil Medvedev is well known for leaving his box mid match and leaving the arena if the game isn't going to his liking.

Speaking to Tennis Majors as part of their Major talk series, he said that it shows Medvedev that he needs to get it right if he does this and he said it is mainly due to his coaching as a result not having the desired effect.

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“First of all, when I decide to leave, it’s not just to go away and then tell Daniil: ‘You didn’t do this, you didn’t do that.’ Or: ‘I’m not happy with that.’ It’s that there’s a situation I don’t agree with, that I don’t feel comfortable with, and I have the right to feel that way, to disagree. So I don’t want to go through it. It’s a situation I don’t want to be in, so I leave," he said as per Tennis Majors.

“In Halle during the game, we get to a point where he’s expressing extreme frustration in my direction. And as a coach in the box, you can’t answer. It’s very difficult. Or we should be able to sit down and have a discussion. But that’s impossible. If I react like him by shouting, to shut him up, it can happen once or twice, but it’s going to put more fuel on the fire. So that’s not the point.”

“I’ve done it in the past, in the middle of a match, and it was successful. It worked because we weren’t at the same place on the path. And this is where the path evolves. So as I know more or less that now it’s not going to have the expected effect anymore, my only possibility because I don’t accept what’s going on – to stay like this until the end of the game when you have a player who’s going crazy all over the place – is that I take my bag and I just leave. That’s it.”

“I think he takes it very well because he’s aware that something has to happen. Otherwise, I accept something that is unacceptable. And that’s not good either. And then there’s the discussion that follows. An explanation where I express my anger, my dissatisfaction, or my disagreement about this. And he’s going to apologize. We’re going to try to understand how we got here, how we can get there.”

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