Dobre on Halep's popularity in Romania: 'Everywhere she's going, everybody knows her and everybody wants a photo, everybody want to speak with her'

Simona Halep will play in the WTA Finals in Shenzhen starting her campaign later today against Bianca Andreescu and ahead of the tournament, her coach Daniel Dobre was asked about the difference in her game going into the tournament.

Dobre said that Halep is very ambitious, focused, very intense in what she is doing at the moment and also her mindset has changed if she loses and she no longer gets down about it anymore.

"The differences are big," Dobre told reporters in Shenzhen. "The main things, her main behaviour, they are there. She's a fighter, she's very ambitious, focused, very intense in everything that she's doing. Doesn't matter if you are on the court or outside the court, she's all the time 100% there.

"But she's learned a little bit more about her feelings on the court, about her feelings outside the court. In the beginning, she was upset if the people were speaking bad, if the people didn't understand her real behavior, her real essence.

"Now she can go over. This is one thing that was really difficult for her. She was reading the paper, reading about what the people said. It was not really good.

"The other thing, she was upset always when she was losing matches. Sometimes you couldn't speak with her after one lost match for two or three days. She was really sad about it.

"Now, it's not that she don't care if she loses - if she loses she cares a lot - but she learned a little bit to control better the emotion. Even today she lost, tomorrow she can start again, she can start preparing the next game.

Popularity in Romania

In terms of her popularity in Romania, Dobre went onto say that Halep is their main and only sporting star and that everyone wants to talk to her and speak to her in Romania. This means that bad stuff gets written in the papers when it goes wrong according to her coach.

"First, you need to understand the sports situation in Romania. Romania was, let's say in communist time before 1990, it was one of the biggest sport countries in the world. In the Olympic Games we were top five all the time, have champions in gymnastics, handball, football, everything.

"Right now we just have Simona at that level.

"Our future good sports champions are gone. Only Simona is there. If you think all the attention that before was for let's say a hundred big sports people, now is going to Simona. It's unbelievable.

"Right now, everywhere she's going, everybody knows her and everybody wants a photo, everybody want to speak with her. She gets all the time some problems with the people because if she won one time, everybody thinks she can win all the time. When she was losing matches, they were very bad to her, really bad things were written in the newspapers.