Victorious Fritz: “I never really know if I’m good on clay or not”

Taylor Fritz says he still doesn’t know if he’s good on clay or not, despite reaching the semi-finals of the Monte-Carlo Masters on Friday.

Fritz beat Stefanos Tsitsipas in the quarter-finals and is the first American to make the last four since Vince Spadea in 2003. He’ll play Andrey Rublev on Saturday for a place in the final and yet, he said, the doubts about the surface remain.

“I never really know if I’m good on clay or not,” he told reporters. “As it is every year for me on clay, it’s not natural for me. Obviously I have not spent a lot of time playing on clay, so I can’t just come to it and play well my first match or two. But I feel like I always, after a couple of matches, play much better.

“For whatever reason, I do think centre court plays much better, different than the other courts, and I have always felt like I play a lot better on centre court as opposed to the other courts here.”

Camera signatures “no insult”

When Tsitsipas won his previous match, he wrote on the screen: “clay courts in the US are like a unicorn on a skateboard”. When Fritz beat the Greek, he wrote: “USA clay???”. Tsitsipas said on Friday that he had been talking about green clay and Fritz said he was just making a joke.

“No, no, no, no, not an insult,” he said. “Let’s talk about this before people get — I don’t want people to, like, think there is some crazy like beef or something. Like it’s more just like a joke, like what he wrote the other day…

“What I take from it is he’s just saying like clay courts in the US aren’t very good or they don’t make sense, which is totally fair. I think maybe people think I write something back on the camera because I’m offended or I’m upset. Not at all. Like I don’t care at all. I guess people don’t know me. I’m like the hardest person to like offend or upset.

“I just thought that like kind of saying something back — obviously he knew that he might play me. I thought just writing something back was funny, like there is no, like I’m not trying to insult him. I just thought it was funny.”

Green clay? No thanks

And Fritz said he far prefers the red clay of Europe than the green clay of the US.

“I hate it,” he said. “I can’t stand green clay. I obviously played a lot on green clay in the US when I was younger and I hated it. First time I came to Europe and played on red clay, immediately I was like, Oh, my God, this is so much better.”

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