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U.S. OPENSeptember 7, 2007Simon AspelinJulian KnowleNEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK THE MODERATOR: Questions. Q. How does it feel to be Grand Slam champions? First time for both of you. SIMON ASPELIN: It's an unbelievable feeling. I think it's going to take a few hours for it to sink in, this week, to really think about it. But at the moment it's a dream come true. It's an amazing feeling. JULIAN KNOWLE: As Simon said, a dream came true. I think it takes a couple of days even to realize what we achieved the last two weeks. The pressure was getting pretty big the last couple of days because we knew we were playing really well and we had a big chance to win this whole thing. To make it happen is just great. Q. This is your first year playing together. How did you decide to team together? Why do you think is working for you? JULIAN KNOWLE: Well, I started the year with Jurgen Melzer, an Austrian player. He got injured on his wrist in March. I was looking for a partner for the season, also for the next couple weeks. I asked Simon because I knew he was looking for partners. He had another partner where he was playing the whole year long, he was changing. I called him up, said, Listen, you want to try those couple tournaments? He said, Yes, sure. Immediately it worked pretty well. The first tournament we played we made semis in Monte-Carlo, and then we made semis in Hamburg. We won a tournament in Austria. Then we just kept playing, and it worked really well. Q. The summer hard court season you didn't have such a great season. What changed here? SIMON ASPELIN: Well, we didn't have -- we had a couple of weeks where we didn't play so good, but it was just a couple of -- there was a couple of details that we didn't do so well. But the rest of the game was quite good. We knew if we could just change a couple of things in the game and get that to start working again we would be dangerous. We played really, really good at the beginning of the summer. You know, we knew we had the game to beat the best teams. Q. You seemed to guess really well on which way they were going when they were trying to poach off the serve. Is that a strength of yours? SIMON ASPELIN: I think one of our strengths when we're playing is that we normally return well. We rely a lot on our returns. Just trying to serve well, hold serve, then we put pressure on them by returning well. I think it's one of our bigger strengths, our returning part. Q. Your opponents had a good season this year. Did you play a special strategy today against them? SIMON ASPELIN: No. We were talking about it yesterday 'cause we played them in the third round of the French Open, and they played extremely well and beat us pretty badly. We were saying that Dlouhy/Vizner is one team when they're playing really good we don't quite know how to play them. Today we were expecting a really, really tough match. We just focused on trying to play as good as we have been the last couple of weeks. But we didn't have that much of a strategy how to play them because they're very, very difficult to play when they're playing well. Q. What can you say about the quality of your opponents, their game? JULIAN KNOWLE: Well, normally they both return really, really well. Pavel, he's very solid pretty much in everything. He returns well. He serves really solid. He's very good at the net. With his partner he's very dangerous. He has great hands. He's more a little bit up and down, but he's a very dangerous player. He returns really hard. He has the pace. He can serve big. But he can also throw in a couple of double-faults. He comes up with the bigger shots at the net, like more exciting ones, but he off and on misses also. He's more up and down where instead Pavel is really solid in everything and he's playing great, I think the best tennis of his career the last couple of weeks. Q. How important was the first break in the match? JULIAN KNOWLE: Well, I had a feeling we were the better team at the beginning. We had break chances almost in every game, 15-40 twice and one more breakpoint. You want to get the break under your belt because you also have a feeling if you don't break maybe they get one chance late in the set and you end up losing the set. I think it was big that we broke. Q. Simon, you follow a strong Swedish tradition of doubles at Grand Slams. Does that have any meaning for you? SIMON ASPELIN: It's great to be part of it now, having won a big tournament. But growing up you get inspired and motivated from watching your countrymen do so well in the tournaments. Now recently Jonas in the last few years having so much success in the big tournaments. It motivates you to try to do as well as possible. End of FastScripts |
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