Don't miss any stories Follow Tennis View

Kei Nishikori: Cause for Concern?

Feb 24th 2017

February is one of those months on the tennis calendar that tends to slip by quietly.  Folks are still recovering from the excitement of Melbourne while looking forward with anticipation to the tennis version of March Madness with the Masters events at Indian Wells and Miami.  What occurs between those times can struggle to really land on the radar, a fact for which Japan's Kei Nishikori is no doubt eternally grateful.

It is not that Nishikori has had a bad start to 2017 or even a bad fourteen months.  He reached the semifinals of the US Open and the ATP World Tour Finals last year and has already made two finals this season.  He pushed Roger Federer to the brink in the fourth round of the Australian Open and is currently ranked Number 5 in the world.  Certainly, there are many players who would love to be sitting where Nishikori is right now.  And yet, based on what fans have seen from him of late, Nishikori looks less-than-pleased with the state of his game and finds an increasing number of question marks surrounding him.

Kei Nishikori

It is curious that Nishikori would play as much as he has these past couple of weeks.  The majority of the highest-ranked players compete little, if at all during February to rest up for the bigger events down the road.  Given that he is among this group and has a history of his body sometimes proving fragile, it is a wonder he has not chosen to sit on the sidelines more heading into March. 

What is more puzzling though is that if he was committed to playing this month, he chose to do so on the red clay of South America.  Outside of some potentially hefty appearance fees, this decision made little sense.  He had some phenomenal results last year on the dirt, so it is not as though his game needs work on that surface.  Even if he were looking for more matches and a confidence boost from making a title run at events that traditionally have sported slightly-weaker fields, his decision to go to South America still seems amiss.  His game is better suited to the hard courts, and he had won the Memphis event the previous four years.  Suffice it to say, his choice of venue for competition is suspect.

Most troubling of all though is that Nishikori has looked lost in recent matches.  It did not help that he lost his sixth consecutive final last week in Buenos Aires and whether a carry-over effect or not, he appeared at a loss for what to do in his opening defeat in Rio.  His frustration boiled over in that contest, as evidenced by the way he smashed a racquet, - a move that one rarely sees from the normally reserved Nishikori.  Is that a sign that he feels frustrated by where he is with his game, perhaps sensing that he has hit a plateau and is unsure of how to move forward?

Only Nishikori knows the answer to that question, and only time will tell how he responds to it.  The good news for him is that with most of February hardly scoring a blip on the radar, he is unlikely to face too much scrutiny going into Indian Wells.  But there is no question that something is not quite right with where he is mentally with his game, and he will be one to keep an eye on as the tennis calendar prepares to move to the Masters in March.