Croatian power to the fore

After a couple of years of playing in Doha and Brisbane (season openers), Cilic has chosen the south-Asia’s only ATP tournament as his destination to start the 2017 season.

In a chat with DTNext, Cilic opened up on the pressure of being a top seed, on the tournament and more.

Coming to a tournament as a top seed is always extra pressure but I am used to that and I like having little pressure under me. It pushes me to be more focused, to be a stronger mentally during the week and during the tournament. It is quite important to open the season well and I learn to also play with responsibility. Ranked at number six is something I am going to see during the year. So, definitely it is great to start the new season with a good performance.

We have a lot of big names still on the entry list. Roberto Bautista Agut is one such amazing player, he played well in this season, has made it to the final of Masters 1000 tournament in Shanghai for the first time and he is showing himself as a great player. He has great prospects for the future as well to reach the top-10. There is Borna Coric, who is coming back to Chennai after playing here for a couple of years. He is a great talent, great player. We are going to be seeing a lot of him and definitely over the years a lot of great players were coming there. 

Chennai brings great memories for me and I have played many times here. I started my ATP career here. It’s always a beautiful memory for me and just hoping I can win in 2017 and continue playing well. The fans are very enthusiastic about sport. They enjoy and plus we have lot of Indian players on the tour who are performing well. 

I always enjoy the tournament; it is considered as one of the toughest ones. It is humid, quite heavy conditions so it is not easy. The conditions, like temperature when compared to Europe, are not easy but I have managed with good preparations in the off season to start well in the first week. It’s always very important to do well in that first week to get a few matches under your belt and to go down to Australia with that good form. The conditions are heavy but I think they quite suit my game.

I joined Jonas (coach Jonas Bjorkman) in August and we’ve already started to work on a lot of things and achieved a lot of success. A few things are the different understanding of the game and how I approach the nets. Everyone has a different understanding of the game and how to approach it tactically, which has been really good for me and we’re going to have a lot of time to work on my game on the nets and I’m really enthusiastic how it’s going to pan out in the next season.