One of Frances Tiafoe’s underarm serves backfired in his second-round match at Rome Open, where he met home crowd favorite Lorenzo Musetti. The Italian reached the serve fast and returned very well to make the American fail to reach the return while receiving the crowd’s boos.
The return was described on Reddit as being “ridiculous.”
Yet, many tennis fans blamed Tiafoe for his positioning. Look at some of them below:
“I haven’t seen a ton of pro underarm serves but don’t you want to take a few steps in as the dropshot/short angle is the most obvious response?”
“Ya foe didn’t play that well. He probably wanted to stay back to make sure that he wasn’t able to hit a good DTL shot but didn’t think he would go for…well that kind of shot”
“:100%. That was a great return but I think if Tiafoe had anticipated that he could’ve easily finished the point.”
The match ended with Lorenzo Musetti’s win (5-7, 6-4, 6-3).
Tiafoe got encouragement from LeBron before Rome
In April, Tiafoe talked about the positive influence that superstar basketball player James LeBron has on him. “LeBron has said some cool stuff to me like keep going, keep believing, you know, cliched stuff but it means so much more coming from him and you know, it’s just cool for those upper echelon guys to see me as one of the best.
He’s like that guy for me, you know everyone has that guy and no matter how many times I see him it’ll never be normality for me and little things like that is probably why I won the tournament in Houston,” Tiafoe said as previously quoted.
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