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ROLAND GARROS

June 5, 2017

Fernando Verdasco

Paris, France

K. NISHIKORI/F. Verdasco

0-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-0

THE MODERATOR: Questions in English.

Q. How difficult did you keep your concentration against Kei? You made many, many mistakes during match. How about?
FERNANDO VERDASCO: Yeah, well, it was a difficult match to explain here, because, you know, things, the feelings on the court, and other ones are maybe what you see from outside.

Yeah, I'm agree with you, and that's for sure. I started the match more or less okay. Not even playing great. But he was making many mistakes in the first set and looking pretty tired, like kind of like looking like that every point after every point.

And after the first set, you know, he start playing, I think, much better, like he start to not make that many mistakes and play much deeper, opening the court.

I was today not able to put the ball where I wanted. Many times make mistakes. Many times playing the ball too short and making him being able to dominate me and attack.

And, you know, it was also a little bit windy, so it was, for both of us, difficult to adjust in every shot. You know, I started to lose the tempo in the match, the distance on the balls, and, you know, there were many games that it could be for him or for me, and many of those games went his way. I think gave him a lot of confidence to start playing better.

And then, you know, all the complaints or all the things that you have been seeing in the first set after he was losing a point or missing a serve, he was not doing it anymore in the third set and fourth set.

It was an uncomfortable match. And of course, you know, I wanted to play in a different way, but sometimes the days are like this in tennis and you have to fight with that.

THE MODERATOR: Questions in Spanish.

Q. At 6-0, you could have continued. And then in the second set, what happened? What did you lose your inspiration?
FERNANDO VERDASCO: Well, as I said, he made a lot of mistakes in the first set. There are a lot of things I could have done and which I ended up not doing.

Either in the second set he should have had a very poor game or I should have made a lot of winning hits. That did not happen.

So he played much better after the first set. As I said before, when he was serving in the first set, he was unhappy. He seemed tired. I had the feeling he was complaining even at one point about pain. But then, all of a sudden in the second set, he started to make less mistakes, virtually no mistakes. He was playing much deeper into the court.

I, at that point, had a hard time playing long balls. Some of the balls I gave him were too short. I think that at one point it was indecisive. I guess he could have taken the set or I could take the set in the second one. Well, he ended up taking it. Then I noticed he was not complaining as much as he did before.

I don't really know what happened to him physically, if he was in some sort of pain. But anyway, quality of his tennis was improving, and it was just the opposite for me. Especially during long rallies. Either I made unforced errors, or sometimes I was really trying to fight hard, and it just didn't work out for me today.

When you play a player like Nishikori, and you play short balls, he puts immediate pressure on you and he dominates, and he did that very successfully, which made it very complicated for me.

Honestly, I could not find myself in this match even when I was leading 6-Love in the first set. You know, I should have been enthusiastic. And yet I could not play my tennis. Well, even after I won the first set. I tried and I just couldn't.

Today was a key match. You can't afford to make, you know, the mistakes I made. And then I just didn't have the right sensations. Once again, you can't afford to have these kind of sensations. The more the matches progresses, the more difficult it becomes.

And really, everything I tried to do I couldn't. It just wasn't working out. When I tried to be more aggressive, I was either hitting the net or something else went wrong. When I tried to accelerate, it was just not working out.

It was very complicated for me. I would actually like to view the match, a screen, to see what went wrong. But again, as far as I'm concerned, what I can say is that I felt very uncomfortable. I just did not feel right playing it. It's quite unfortunate, I have to say. Quite sad.

Because my training before the match went very well. Last week everything went very well, as well. I was quite hopeful, I must say, and I was indeed very much looking forward to continuing into the tournament. I really wanted to win today's match. It didn't happen, and I'm quite disappointed about it.

Q. So we will not see you play Andy Murray. You have played him in quarterfinals, but maybe you can try again at the US Open. You came so close.
FERNANDO VERDASCO: Yes. When you hit the quarterfinals, you know, if you don't play Nishikori, you play Murray. If you don't play Murray, you play Nadal. You always end up playing top players. Only very few occasions have I played other players who are not necessarily in top seeds in quarterfinals.

But anyway, at this point, I'm going to focus on my grass season. I'm going to do my very best to prepare well for Wimbledon. I'm going to go there two weeks ahead of time and do better. Grass is a bit more complicated for me in terms of surface.

First of all because there are a lot of players out there who serve very well on grass. So I think they are more likely to win on grass compared to clay or even on hard courts compared to clay.

But again, I'm going to do my very best to prepare well, to start the tournament in the best condition.

After Wimbledon I will have two weeks on clay, and then I'm going to -- I will be in the U.S. As I said, I'm going to prepare and do my very best for the next tournaments.

You know, what I do after a match like today is that I like to press the reset button. The reset button which takes me back to square 1. I would not want today's loss to affect me too much. So from now on I am going to press that reset button, and hopefully that will put me in a good position to start my next tournaments.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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