Daniil Medvedev wants hawk-eye to be used for double bounce decisions after feeling like a call went against him on Friday. The Russian was beaten by Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon semi-finals and received a warning in the first set.
A marginal call saw umpire Eva Asderaki-Moore call ‘not up’ when an Alcaraz drop shot appeared to bounce twice before Medvedev forced it back over the net. An angry reaction followed, with footage suggesting that Medvedev directed several f-words towards Asderaki-Moore and was lucky to avoid a default, although the player himself insists he was speaking in Russian.
“If you verbally abuse the umpire, that’s when there’s a question mark,” said BBC pundit Tim Henman. “It could be a default.”
Medvedev escaped punishment of that magnitude and was given a code violation instead. After the match, the player shed new light on the interaction and put forward his case for hawk-eye to eradicate further condusion around ‘not up’ calls.
“I don’t know if it was double bounce or not,” said Medvedev. “I thought no. That was tricky. The thing is that once long ago Roland Garros against (Marin) Cilic I lost, and she didn’t see that was one bounce. So I had this in my mind. I thought, again, against me. I said something in Russian, not unpleasant, but not over the line. So I got a code for it.”
When asked whether he was wary of being defaulted, Medvedev continued: “Not at all because, as I say, I didn’t say anything too bad. The thing is that I think it would be so much easier with a challenge system.
“The challenge system shows a bounce. So if there was a bounce, it would show it. Then if we use it, we would never have this situation. So I don’t know why don’t we use the challenge system for double bounce, the hawk-eye or whatever.”
Medvedev lost in straight sets to Alcaraz in last year’s Wimbledon semi-finals but gave a better account of himself this time around, even if it didn’t lead to a spot in Sunday’s grand finale.
Putting Alcaraz under pressure early on, Medvedev won the first set via a one-sided tiebreak. But that was as good as it got for the 28-year-old as his younger, faster opponent found an extra gear to win 6-7 6-3 6-4 6-4.
