STOP Hating on Gauff & Gilbert | Navarro Great Player | Tiafoe Impressive | MMTR

welcome to another edition of the Monday morning tennis rant we are entering week two of the 2024 US Open and I feel like some of the energy has been drained out of this tournament by both alcaraz and jokovic exiting early shockingly so however we're going to see some fresh faces possibly in deep stages of the men's tournament so in today's video I'm going to give you an update on my draw because you know I made a lot of mistakes uh this is one of my worst draws there was a tremendous amount of draw Busters there I have made some pretty good picks and some of the players that I chose to go far are still active and on top of that I want to focus on two matches that happened yesterday Tif for papin and golf against Navaro and let me start off with Goff and Navaro and I planned to make a video about golf after she had lost to Schneider in Cincinnati and I had prepared this video and I actually clipped up a lot of the comments and I decided not to do this video because the whole Center story broke and it just wasn't the right time but I'm going to use today's rant to share my thoughts on the golf situation and look I follow social media very closely I've been doing it now for six years and I've never ever seen so much Nega ity directed towards a player as much as I've seen it in the case of Koko go and I simply don't understand why there's no reason to be negative about KOCO go she is a phenomenal player US Open Champion pigula is going to take over in the rankings but she was the number one American period men and women combined the highest ranked player and there's really no reason to hate she also happs to be a great role model very nice person and it's just a great story altogether so it is incredible how much negativity there is in the comment sections every time when Coco go loses a match take a look at some of these comments after her loss in Cincinnati to Schneider who by the way is a great player there's no shame losing to Schneider same with yesterday there's no shame in losing to Emma Navaro and before I get into the golf thing let me give credit to Emma Navaro she's a phenomenal player her performance is a bit overshadowed by all the negativity surrounding golf but Navaro is a complete player has beautiful Strokes stylistically speaking she's a phenomenal athlete moves really well but to me the one stroke that stands out in aaro and is related to some of the issues that Koko had in yesterday's match is her return of ser Emma Navaro both on the forehand and the backhand returns phenomenally well on top of that she's a very complete player can come to the net finish points off there she can slice the back end she can hit the Drop shots she's a fun player to watch and she did phenomenally well in her match against Koko yesterday so Koko and her match had 19 double faults and I wasn't surprised to see a tremendous amount of comments saying that cooko go has a horrible serve so let's talk about double faulting at the elite level it happens do you remember a few days ago I talked about it Novak jokovic hit 14 double faults in his loss to poin okay he played an extra set it was a four set loss kokov lost in three sets but the double fault numbers are pretty close 14 for jokovic 19 for goth did I see any comments saying that jovic has a horrendous serve that he needs to get another coach I know he doesn't have a coach right now but he needs to stop playing tennis and fix his serve before he steps on the court again no we didn't see any of those comments about jokovic now is there anything wrong with jovic's served I mean after all he hit 14 double faults I can tell you there's absolutely nothing wrong with jovic's second serve more specifically his kick serve and despite not having any technical deficiencies he still hit 14 double faults well how is that possible well the game of tennis involves your mind and your mind can create changes in your Technique based on how you're feeling at that exact moment in time so when you lose trust in a shot this can have a very negative effect so you miss a few second serves and all of a sudden you become more tentative more careful and this leads to more and more mistakes and this is a cycle that's very difficult to break so if you watch my video on Coco golf's second serve from a few days ago yes there are some suboptimal technical elements on her second serve and despite these suboptimal technical elements cooko still hits a good second serve after all she is a US Open champion and was ranked number two in the world she's also a doubles Grand Slam Champion so it's obvious there is proof that this serve despite having some suboptimal elements it still works however when she's not feeling her best when the confidence is not high yes on her second serve and also on her forehand she can make too many mistakes there's no doubt about that now one unfortunate thing is that one of my favorite coaches of all time is being dragged into this negativity surrounding Coco go and that's Brad Gilbert I recommend to everyone to read his two books I got your back and winning ugly Brad Gilbert is not only a former top five tennis player phenomenal athlete we're talking about the mental game he was able to beat opponents that were technically Superior to him with his mind he's an incredibly introspective guy and possibly understands the nuances of the tennis game better than anyone so when Brad was finished with his playing career he started coaching Andrew agasse and many other great players and he had great success doing so now despite Brad coming to Koko's team and Koko playing Amazing winning tournaments in Washington the 1,000 tournament in Canada winning the US Open becoming the number two player in the world all with Brad Gilbert as a coach despite all that there is possibly thousands of comments saying that Brett Gilbert needs to be fired Brett Gilbert needs to go Brad Gilbert is a horrible coach and it's just amazing to me how people do not understand the nuances of the game on top of all that it appears that even people that are very knowledgeable about the game of tennis don't seem to understand the nuances of the game either because I hated to see Brad Gilbert grilled at Wimbledon on TV after Coco lost to Navaro and the same thing happened yesterday Brad Gilbert was grilled on TV about Coco's technique as if he was the one that made 19 double Falls and as if he is the one that made 60 unforced errors in the match what can Brad Gilbert do from The Stance regarding unforced erors and double faults not much because tennis is a very complex game now people are saying why doesn't Brad change her technique why isn't Brad changing her forehand or her second serve well you got to listen to Brad to understand why Brad is not changing those things because Brad said when Koko is on the practice court she can make 30 serves in a row so from a coach's perspective this makes absolute sense if a player is doing well and practice and making shots there's absolutely no reason to start making changes and put some kind of jinx into a specific shot and from day one it is clear that a lot of the problems that Coco suffering from are problems that are appearing mostly under pressure in singles not so much in doubles and definitely not in practice now are there technical things that Koko can change on the kick serve absolutely do you make those technical changes in the middle of the US Open absolutely not Koko has been playing tennis for a long time Koko has hit Millions upon millions of tennis balls technical changes take time to implement this is something that you do in the off seon and not in the middle of a tournament so the fact that Brad Gilbert one of the greatest coaches in the history of tennis is being grilled on TV and being asked these questions makes absolutely no sense it's not fair to him now you could make an argument and say why is Brad Gilbert even on TV commentating it's a conflict of interest and kahill is doing it too listen the tennis world is very small and every single person that's in tennis talking about it on TV has some sort of conflict of interest why because most of these people that are on TV are somehow involved in tennis coaching or somehow have been involved in tennis coaching whether it's academies whether it's private coaching and so on so you're going to get tons of situations where somebody's commentating on a match where there's a player that was previously coached by them the problem is that the tennis world is very small and naturally there's going to be a lot of conflict of interest to be fair when Boris Becker was coaching Novak jokovic he stopped commentating on TV and then when that relationship ended with jokich he went back on TV that is for sure the best way to do it to suspend the commentating activities while coaching a player that's on tour that's going to be the best for the player and the coach but again we don't know the details if the player is okay with the coach commentating and that was agreed beforehand then I guess there is no uh problems with it I know that kahill who is coaching Center does not commentate on men's matches just on women's matches however it was a little bit uncomfortable for kahill being a broadcaster and being asked all these questions on ESPN so the whole thing is weird Okay a lot of conflicts of interest going on in the tennis world but one thing's for sure the hate that Koko gets is ridiculous take a look at her year so far one the tournament in Oakland semis Australia semis French one the doubles at the French fourth round Wimbledon fourth round US Open that's a great year she got a great chance to qualify for the yearend championship look in my draw I didn't pick Goff to go past the fourth round I actually thought that Navaro was going to lose to kostuk and I picked kostuk to beat Goff because she had beaten her earlier this year in stutgart and the reason why I picked off to lose because what happens with a lot of players is the following they win a huge tournament they come back the next year they have all these points to defend there's a lot more pressure and they end up failing under that pressure you know who else had a hard time winning a second US Open Pete Sampras he won the US Open at 18 and then did not play well for a while until finding his form again so this is something that a lot of players go through and to me this was not a surprise at all that Koko was gonna play worse in this year's hardcore swing than she did in the last one because in the last one there was a lot less pressure she was playing freely and this one there was a tremendous amount of pressure all these points to defend and she played worse than last year this is completely normal completely acceptable I do think now that all this pressure is released Koko is going to start playing a lot better let's talk about TFO against paperin first of all it's not fair to put the men's match on first and then the women's match in the night session it's not fair for the players but it's also not fair for us viewers because that way we only get to see one match because listen I fall asleep okay I have a hard time staying up super late but when you have a woman's match first that's best of three that's not going to last as long we get to see the woman's match and then the men's match maybe starts at 9 10 cuz the first one starts at 7 so we get the what watched two matches we at least catch the first two sets of the men's match before falling asleep having the women play second during the night session doesn't make a lot of sense so TFO against paperin first of all TFO won one of the most important matches of his career by beating Shelton Shelton was playing well serving well and he was also up two sets to one against TFO and the fact that TFO came through that match playing exceptional tennis from a mental standpoint that match was enormous and he came into the paperin match with a lot of confidence because of it so he started strong winning the first set and paperin had 5340 love on his serve in the second set now you could call it a choke but if you watch those points TFO played some excellent tennis and definitely earned those points paperin did not give them to TFO and tfo's fighting very hard in this match he was playing some good defense ended up winning that second set 76 paperin was playing really well in the third and then TFO toughed out the fourth set for me the most impressive thing about TFO is the combination of power athleticism but also feeli because it's rare to see a player with so much feel with such soft hands who can also hit the ball unbelievably hard and who's also an unbelievable athlete the other player that comes to mind that has those attributes is Carlos alaras but to me the way TFO hits those backhand chip slices when the other person comes to a net right at their feet the way he hits R shots the way he hits Top Spin lobs the way he hooks those little angle forehand crosscourt shots the guy has some of the best pants that I've ever seen on the tennis courts so let's take a look at the draw TF is on the bottom and he's going to play demitro demitro has had such a phenomenal season I feel like something big is in store for demitro this year you could make an argument for any of these four guys to make the final we got Fritz ver on top and we got demitro TFO on the bottom each one of these guys could make the final for me the favorite of course is verev but it's going to be super interesting to see who comes out these quarterfinals and semi-finals on the bottom half of the draw today we have some good matches Center against Paul I think that's going to be a tough match but I do see Center coming through that one we got meev against boures what a surprise boures was not playing well on the hardcourts prior to the US Open so there a big surprise that he made it all the way through to the fourth round two players that are struggling Jerry made the final of room and has not won a match since I picked him to go to the third round he lost to oconnell in the first and of course tipas I have high regards for tipas as a player and he's just in a big slump he played so well in mon Carlo I thought that tournament was going to turn his season around but it didn't on the bottom we have two Australians Thompson and deau I do see dearo coming through that one and then mahaj against Draper that's a tough one to call I think Draper is going to come through that one Draper has one of the best serves on tour and my feeling is that dra paper is going to make the semifinals on the top half of the draw in the woman's draw my pick rebaka pulled out prior to the second round so obviously that's not going to happen but sabalenka is playing so well I'm sticking with this pick I do think that sabalenka is going to make the final on the bottom she plays against Jen next to beat vage I picked that wrong Jang is playing an amazing season but I feel like sabalenka is playing with a lot of confidence also not having played the Olympics is an advantage and I think it's going to show but one great pick that I made is badosa I had a feeling that badosa is going to make it through the semis we'll see if she can beat Navaro or not but she did make it through the quarterfinals on top I picked the upset of Pula beating shant let's see if that happens both of them have to make it into the quarters first with a couple of tough opponents Sam sonova for Shante and and Schneider for Pula is by no means easy on the bottom we have Pini against moova and I picked oaka to make it to the quarters soaka did play well in the first round she had a really tough draw moov is such a fun player to watch such a complete player and palini is having such a great season this might be the best match today the moova Pini match on the women's side so now that the bakina is out I am sticking with Pula and I'm going to say that Pula is going to make make it into the final and will she beat sabalenka I don't know about that one I think sabalenka is going to take the title