Watching Daria “Dasha” Gavrilova “imploding” at the Australian Open last night was hard.
After the game Gavrilova found it necessary to apologise for her on-court behaviour, tweeting to her 20,000 Twitter followers she was a “spoiled brat out there” and she was “sorry about her horrible behaviour”.
In her post-match press conference, after her 6-0, 6-3, 6-2 defeat to 10th seed Spaniard Carla Suarez Navarro, the Russian native said: “I played very well in the first set. I guess I was starting to overcook it a little bit in the second, got very emotional. I was just going crazy.”
“I’m very disappointed with myself. I was being a little girl.”
Watching the 21-year-old behave like a “spoiled brat” was hard – not because it was an embarrassing display of arrogance, rudeness and unsportsmanlike behaviour – but because I was watching a sportsperson choke under immense psychological pressure.
Yes, toward the end of the game there was some racket throwing and bouncing (not good), a bit of yelling at herself, a host of contorted facial expressions, and a rapidly increasing unforced error count. The worst commentators said was that Gavrilova “unravelled” or she “imploded”.
What Gavrilova didn’t do was scream at the umpire, or blame the crowd, or yell at her coach in the stands. She didn’t snatch a towel out of the ball-kids’ hands and give them a gobfull about their failure to be fast enough between serves. When she “imploded” Gavrilova took it out on herself – quite the antithesis of fellow Australians Nick Kyrgios, Bernard Tomic and, yes, Lleyton Hewitt, whose heated emotions can turn both inward and outward during a match.
Watch the many emotions of Gavrilova during the Australian Open here. Post continues below.