Daniil Medvedev clashing with crowds is about as uncommon as a rainbow, and we got to see it during his Paris Masters match against Grigor Dimitrov.
There is something lovely about Medvedev playing tennis in Paris. Maybe it's because he's a fluent French speaker, but French crowds annoy the Russian quite a bit.
He clashed with the Parisian crowd earlier this year at Roland Garros and did so at the Paris Masters as well. It's not something he does on purpose, as he explained a few months ago.
It's also something he wants to eliminate from his game because, frequently, it messes up his focus, which is not good. Even so, it seems like a huge part of personality to clash with crowds.
Today's instance came as the crowd kept whistling at Medvedev, to which he responded with the 'hush' gesture. The crowd didn't take it lightly as he said that he wouldn't play until they stopped.
Eventually, the match continued, and Medvedev actually won that second set. He did lose the match in the end, which the crowd loved, but he had some signals for them before leaving the crowd.
While walking off the court, Medvedev played with his hands but then showed a few fans the middle finger, which wasn't by accident, of course.
He knew what he was doing, but cameras caught him, so we'll see if there will be some consequences to that. It's not exactly sportsmanlike to do that, even though the players themselves endure quite a bit of unsportsmanlike conduct from the crowd quite often.
As for Medvedev, he turned his attention to Turin, where he played really well last year but lost all of his matches in a 3rd set tiebreak, which was heartbreaking. It was a much better season overall for the Russian despite some shaky results in recent weeks.
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