Andrey Rublev was caught up in a storm at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships as he screamed in the face of a line judge in Russian and faced the punishment of getting defaulted. In the mind of Andy Roddick though, he shouldn’t feel that aggrieved.
Rublev had the tennis world rally round him including Alejandro Davidovich Fokina and Daria Kasatkina who called for VAR in tennis. But Roddick on the other hand was less sympathetic saying that he took it too far and is now facing the consequences for such an act.
“Rublev can’t be that upset,” Roddick said on his podcast Served. “Whether he deserved it or he didn’t, he put himself in position for someone to be able to make a judgment call.”
“He has to now give up his prize money for the week, his ATP ranking points for the week, drops him out of the Top 5 in the world,” he said. “I don’t know what his meltdown on Friday has to do with his first, second, and third-round victories.
“He will have some of the blame because he went too far, but taking the money for the week, taking away the points because of a judgment call of some guy in a chair, that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“If there’s an element of danger like Tsitsipas rifling the ball into a crowd of Wimbledon and it almost hits a kid, not cool,” Wertheim said in response: “If a tennis player in the third set is frustrated and he takes out some aggression and says some things he shouldn’t say in a different language than the recipient, is that really worthy of default?”