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ROGERS CUP

August 9, 2017

Milos Raonic

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

A. MANNARINO/M. Raonic

6-4, 6-4

THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.

Q. Can you take us through what maybe went wrong from the beginning of that game.
MILOS RAONIC: Yeah, I just started slow. He got comfortable there. I managed to scrap my way back. I didn't serve well. I didn't do the things I needed to do well. He was the one that was able to dictate more than I was. I wasn't hitting the ball particularly well.

But it is what it is. He plays a unique way. He made it uncomfortable for me. I was just there trying to make the most with what I had today.

Q. How frustrating was it to get off to such a slow start, losing eight points in a row? And you had trouble with your backhand today. Talk about that.
MILOS RAONIC: Yeah, it wasn't fun to start that way, and it wasn't fun to necessarily play the way I did. I just struggled.

It was hard for me to really put any pace on a backhand. I tried using the slice a little bit more. But it didn't really come together as well as I would have hoped.

Q. Was that minor injury not so minor after all?
MILOS RAONIC: It's quite minor in the sense of can I get worse or not, but it wasn't minor in the sense of quantity of pain.

Q. Obviously frustration level is high right now, extra so because of the fact losing your first match here in Canada.
MILOS RAONIC: Yeah, I wanted to have definitely a different storyline here. It wasn't necessarily the case. It is what it is. Hopefully I can turn it around very quickly because today was not a level of tennis to be proud of.

Q. He seemed to be able to return your serve more than normally happens to your opponents. Was it his ability to read the trajectory of your serve or you were having an off day?
MILOS RAONIC: I wasn't sharp enough with what I needed to be sharp with. On the serve, I guess I just let too many other things that were going on get to me, and I didn't necessarily ever get around to really focusing on it completely and making him uncomfortable.

I kept sort of worrying about other things when I should have just been in those moments, focused on what I need to do to serve well the next point.

Q. We just talked to Mannarino. He said maybe he knew that you had a problem with your wrist. He worked your backhand. Were you aware of that during the match?
MILOS RAONIC: Yeah, at the beginning, because he knew I was going to stand all the way over there, he actually started going more to my forehand, started serving more to my forehand than he normally would.

You could see when the important moments were, when it was sort of the critical points, that he would harp down on that side. I really couldn't do much there.

Q. Did I miss something about what the state of the wrist is, the prognosis?
MILOS RAONIC: Nothing serious in the sense of something that can get worse, but it's sort of you bite your tongue. I've tried to sort of calm it down, but it can just be quite painful.

Q. How confident are you that this will heal and you will be in top form, say, by US Open?
MILOS RAONIC: Quite confident. It's an injury that a lot of -- to some extent a lot of tennis players have. To me it's just really flared up over the last few days. I wasn't able to even hold the racquet two days ago. That's why I did request if I could have as many hours as possible before I stepped on court to play.

So I hope that today wasn't really a setback, and that I can over these next days continue to calm it down and try to get it under control as much as possible.

Q. You keep talking about pain. Did you play with painkillers? Did you take anything before?
MILOS RAONIC: I've been just on antiinflammatories to get the swelling down, not specifically painkillers. More just because my wrist at this moment, from the scanning I did, has quite a bit of fluid in it.

Q. Do you know how you did it, what caused it? Have you had this problem before?
MILOS RAONIC: I've had it to small extents. Not like this. Normally I've had it where the next day, if I hit a few off backhands, the next day I just don't hit backhands and I'm okay, let's say, within 36 to 48 hours.

The recent time it happened to me was actually before the quarters at Wimbledon, between that long match with Zverev and the quarterfinal. But it calmed down quite quickly. This time it's stuck around quite a bit longer.

Q. If you weren't playing here at home in Montreal, would you have withdrew from the tournament before playing?
MILOS RAONIC: I don't know if I could say that with a definite answer. But I think I would have had definitely a different level of consideration to it, that's for sure.

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