“I spoke to my team before the match about it and said to expect that, prepare for it if things were not going his way. So I was trying to do that.”
The three-time Grand Slam champion believed the eight-minute bathroom break influenced the result, having clawed his way back from 0-5 down in the fourth set before losing it 3-6.
He said: “The issue is that you cannot stop the way that that affects you physically. When you’re playing a brutal match like that, you know, stopping for seven, eight minutes, you do cool down. You can prepare for it mentally as much as you like, but it’s the fact that it does affect you physically when you take a break that long, well, multiple times during the match.”
He also noted that, after he won the third set, Tsitsipas took a medical timeout and later and stopped a game briefly to change his racket when the Brit was 0-30 up on his serve in the fourth.