DUBAI // Ernests Gulbis believes he needs a couple of weeks off to set his game right after the No5 seed was knocked out of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championship by Uzbek Denis Istomin.
Gulbis, ranked No 14 at the moment, has yet to win a match in 2015 and his 7-5, 6-2 defeat by the world No 65 yesterday means the Latvian has now lost seven matches on the trot since beating Andreas Seppi to reach the semis in Moscow last October.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Gulbis, who had won two titles in the first half of 2014 and reached the last four at the French Open to climb to a career high No10 before the slide started. His win-loss record since Roland Garros is 9-14.
“I’m not in good form right now. I’m not feeling my shots at all. I have no timing. In practice I have been playing worse than in the match.
“I moved well in the beginning of the match, but somehow it’s tough when you don’t have the feeling for the shots.
“Every player is different, but for me it’s very important to have feeling of the racquet when I contact the ball. It is a purely technical thing. If I have it, everything slowly starts to put together, the moving, the serve, everything. As soon as I lose the feeling of the racquet, of the contact of the ball, everything else collapses.”
Gulbis’ problems started with a shoulder injury in the second half of last season and since then he has been struggling to get that familiar feeling with the racquet.
“I have really struggled since, including the US Open,” Gulbis said. “I just went and played because I knew that injury cannot get worse. I needed time to fix it and I needed my offseason time to fix it.
“So in the off-season, I couldn’t practice 100 per cent because for two weeks I was fixing my injury. So all these things, they come together.
“Two weeks would be good for practice, for good practice, and then I can change something.
“To go from tournament to tournament and to try to change things in two, three days, it’s almost impossible for me.”
arizvi@thenational.ae
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