Nick Kyrgios grabs all the headlines, but an Aussie player his senior by just a couple of years is also falling on some hard times.
That player is Bernard Tomic, who is having a bad season, if you will pardon the understatement. He crashed out in the first round of the U.S. Open at FlushingMeadow, New York. He won the first set of his match against Giles Müllerof Luxemburg, but then surrendered the next three rather timidly in the round of 128, with the final outcome of 6 – 3, 3 – 6, 4 – 6, 4 – 6 sending Tomic to the exit.
He has fallen to the point where he may have to qualify for the Australian Open in January of 2018. He had been ranked as high as no. 17 in the world at one point and had made it as far as the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam when he made it that far at Wimbledon in 2011.
Contrast that to this year, where he bowed out of The Championships in the first round and put forth so little effort that he set a record for a player being fined $US15,000 for saying that he was “a little bored” during his loss to Gilles Simon.
The U.S. Open was the first match for Tomic since that time and his lighter wallet apparently did little to speed up his feet when he met Müller on Court 10.
Tomic has a short amount of time to increase his ranking up to no worse than 105th if he desires to get direct entry into the Australian Open.
He will need to have some strong results during the Asian swing in order to do that and the potential of Tennis Australia offering him a wildcard berth is rather dubious, as Tomic shunned representing Australia at the 2016 Rio Olympics and no longer plays Davis Cup for Australia.
Almost makes Kyrgios seem angelic by comparison, does it not?
