Portuguese tennis player, Joao Sousa won his first title of the year 2022, at the Maharashtra Open held at Pune over the last week. His longtime coach Frederico Marques spoke about the 32 year old’s ATP victory in an interview following the final match.
Having coached Sousa for such a long time now, Marques was certainly glad as they conquered another title in their successful journey. “We feel happy, that the hard work we did and always believed in made sense. We believe in continuity. In our past. In the direction we were going. We thought that what we were doing would serve something in the future. There was a lot of resilience, a lot of persistence on João’s part,” the Portuguese coach spoke about Sousa ‘s win at the final match of the ATP event.
Although they are one of the most successful duos of the tennis world, Frederico Marques and Joao Sousa have had their ups and downs when it comes to performance and coaching.
Sousa outplayed Finnish player Emil Ruusuvuori at the final match of the Maharashtra Open, to claim the fourth title of his tennis career.
Thanking the Portuguese athlete, Marques expressed- “I thank him so much for believing in me. The easiest thing would have been for him to have gone looking for another coach because things weren’t going well. But he believed in the process and never blamed me for anything. Nor I to him. I blamed myself many times.”
Coach Marques continued that he had many sleepless nights even with his wife by his side, he kept on wondering what had went wrong. Only at the end of last year did they saw the results of the changes they made over the past year.
“He was very open mentally, believing in his tennis and his movement was improving day by day. Our idea would be to start the season with ATP qualifications, but this week João ended up pulling the rabbit out of his hat and ended up winning five matches in a row,” Frederic Marques stated sharing how the tour was good on a physical level as well as on the tennis level.
The Portuguese coach described what Joao Sousa did to be what the champions do and congratulated the latter.
Sousa also played the Australian Open 2022, but was outclassed by the young Italian Jannik Sinner in the very first round of the Grand Slam title.
