Tsitsipas beaten in first match on grass in Stuttgart

Stefanos Tsitsipas spent much of his time after Roland Garros in Dubai which didn't help him much against Richard Gasquet at the Stuttgart Open.

The Greek player was never a really good grass player though he did win a title on the surface last year. He also had a really solid run at Wimbledon but lost to eventual finalist Kyrgios in that one. This year's grass season didn't start off well, in fact, it started off very poorly. He faced Richard Gasquet who is a fair player but quite old and not as good anymore.

Even so, Tsitispas wasn't able to beat Gasquet who is closer to retirement than anything of note in tennis and it just shows that he didn't really focus much on tennis lately. His social media feed contributes to that assertion. The start of the match was fair for the Greek but eventually, Gasquet was able to battle back from a break down and make it a tie game.

The rest of the set didn't bring that much excitement as the French veteran won it in the tiebreak 10-8. The second set saw Tsitsipas break Gasquet in the first game of the set and storm towards a really strong conclusion after that. 6-2 was the final score in that set. The final one once again saw Tsitsipas apply some early pressure but he didn't get much out of it as Gasquet was able to survive that.

Later on, we saw Tsitsipas cruise until he arrived at the last game of the match where he struggled and eventually crumbled under pressure. He gave Gasquet multiple match points saving a few of them but he couldn't turn it around completely as Gasquet did end up winning the match 7-5. Just a performance from Tsitsipas who had 19 aces and 38 winners but he didn't spread them out well enough.