"It's not really nice to have a rivalry with someone": Mirra Andreeva doesn't relish rivalry with familiar foe Victoria Mboko as defending Dubai champion returns

Mirra Andreeva opens her account as defending champion at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships on Tuesday morning and the 18-year-old relished seeing her face plastered all over the walls of the hotel and around the tournament facilities.

Andreeva though has felt the air of pressure which has turned into excitement at being that player going into a tournament and expected to back it up after a year which saw her go from one of the top players on the circuit this time last year to missing out on the WTA Finals.

But speaking to The National in Dubai, she said that letting go of that pressure saw her become more excited than anything else. “When I was supposed to come here after Doha, I thought that I would feel so much pressure on defending my title for the first time and coming as a defending champion for the first time,” Andreeva told The National.

“But now all I feel is excitement. I don't know why. It kind of took me by surprise a little bit as well. But I think that's the same feeling that I'm going to experience in Indian Wells.

“And you know, you're just going to have to learn how to maybe deal with the pressure when it comes when you defend the title. But if you want to win tournaments, if you want to be a great player or be number one in the world, you're not going to be winning tournaments without defending titles after.

“So it's just a normal thing to experience. And I think as soon as I understood that, it just made things easier for me.”

But while winning Dubai and Indian Wells brought about exactly what they were yearning for as a team when it came to Andreeva, she said that dealing with the expectation to then win more was a bit of a tough lesson to deal with.

“After Dubai and Indian Wells, of course, it was pretty challenging to go to Miami because, I didn't have much time to practice there. And also a lot of people were expecting me to win Miami as well. So I was like, well, you know what people? I will try my best,” Andreeva reflected.

“But of course, no promises. And after it was also a little bit tough because people were expecting me to win every single tournament that I would play.

“So it was something new that I experienced for the first time in my career. And now I also know how it feels and how to go through that. So I guess it was one of those lessons that you have to go through in your career to improve as a player, I guess.”

As was not reaching the WTA Finals, Andreeva only played in the doubles after Elena Rybakina and Jasmine Paolini did the almost impossible and both overtook her for the final spots after an end of season meltdown which saw Andreeva not want to play for a while but she said that putting things into perspective helped in that she's only 18 and will have peaks and troughs.

“When we talked with Conchita on what we both want to work on, we pretty much said that we both like how I play right now, just I need to be more consistent with some points of my game,” Andreeva explained. “And we worked a lot on my serve, on my volley game, on the touch, on keep playing aggressive. So just kind of making a little touch-ups on the things that I do right now on the court.”

“Sometimes I do forget that I'm still just 18. And when I remember that, I'm like, what am I even stressing about? I'm just 18 years old. I have like a whole career ahead of me. So sometimes when I remember about that, it makes things easier,” she says.

She will also have the new rivalry which has taken focus in multiple big games already this year against Victoria Mboko albeit unlike others and with her trademark humour, she said that she'd prefer not to have a rivalry at all.

“I do think that we might have something going on in the future like this, because obviously this year we played against each other twice already. And I think that there are going to be so many tournaments in the future that we're going to play against each other."

“It's not really nice to have a rivalry with someone. But if I were to choose one player, it's just nice to share those moments with her because I’ve known her for a long time, obviously. She's a great player, so I don't mind to have something like this going on in the future.”