What is it like to coach Jannik Sinner?
“It’s a shitty track,” replied his Australian coach Darren Cahill.
“We don’t get paid enough. That man is constantly making things difficult for us, and he is constantly taking our money in card games.”
Cahill was joking, of course. That question was asked by Sinner himself when he attended his coaches’ press conference on Friday evening.
“Finally the truth comes out,” Sinner smiled as he left the room.
The real answer to Sinner’s inner sanctum came on the eve of the Australian Open.
“Maybe the most important thing is the company you keep,” Sinner said before his breakout tournament began.
“This is what you keep forever, isn’t it? Maybe you will always remember these things even after your career.
“(Cahill) not only gives you a point of view on tennis, but also the overall picture. I really like this.
“I love the company I have. We are having lots of fun.
“If we all lived together in a house 24/7, that would be possible… because we don’t make any problems.”
Sinner had fired veteran coach Ricardo Piatti after a string of losses in 2022 and signed Simone Vagnozzi.
Cahill was called up last year after coaching world number 1 Lleyton Hewitt (ages 12 and up), Andre Agassi and Simona Halep.
Since the start of 2023, Sinner is 70-15, with only fellow finalist Daniil Medvedev recording more wins (72-18).
Cahill called Vagnozzi the mastermind behind the operation.
“I have more control over everything,” he said.
“Certainly we discuss the tactics and the technical side and all that, but Simone is the voice.
“He is the man behind much of what you see in Jannik’s improvements.”
It is understood that Cahill’s calming influence has also been a catalyst for Sinner storming into the final on Sunday night.
Sinner has won three of his past four matches against Novak Djokovic and his past three matches against Medvedev … after dropping his first six.
And it was in Alberton where Cahill learned the essence of his trade.
“95 per cent of my coaching throughout my career has been through the Port Adelaide Football Club,” Cahill said.
“It’s just what I grew up with, with my dad coaching there for so many years and being successful.
“There are some customs, some cultures and some ways of coaching that never leave you.”
That’s why Port Adelaide’s only premiership coach, Mark Williams, will be back in Sinner’s box when he fights Daniil Medvedev.
Williams’ father, the legendary Fos Williams, coached Cahill’s father, John Cahill, and made him captain of Port.
An inaugural Australian Football Hall of Famer, Fos played in six Flags and coached a further three, while John Cahill played in four and coached a further 10.
When John Cahill left to coach Collingwood in 1983, he made Mark Williams captain and Darren left to play tennis worldwide, reaching the semi-finals of the US Open in 1988.
The Williams and Cahill families have been linked for decades and in 2018 Darren joined the Port Adelaide board.
The magic of the SANFL Magpies spreads across Sinner, the boy who prefers skiing the slopes to serving and slicing on the tennis courts.
Sinner comes from the German-speaking town of San Candido in northwestern Italy.
His father is a chef and his mother waited tables at the same restaurant.
But at the age of 14, Sinner left to pursue a career in tennis and stormed to his first slam final by dropping just one set.
Suddenly, Sinner, a Gucci model and Rolex ambassador, is one win away from becoming the first Italian singles champion at the Australian Open and only the third Italian player to win a men’s Grand Slam.
He would also become the first redhead winner at Melbourne Park since 1996 – and there are six reasons why that’s worth mentioning.
They are the Carota Boys, six Italian boys from the small town of Revello who dress up as carrots and travel the world screaming for Sinner.
Their costumes pay tribute to Sinner’s red hair and also to his choice of a treat – carrots, instead of the usual banana – during a competition in Vienna in 2019.
The Carota Boys share a WhatsApp group with Sinner and have almost 90,000 Instagram followers.
“They’re more famous than me, to be honest,” Sinner once said of his superfans.
A CHAMPION MADE AGAIN: HOW HOT-HEADED MEDVEDEV COOLED HIS JETS
Daniil Medvedev the Zen master.
Now there is a description that no one could have seen coming about the Russian who has proudly worn the name tennis villain for years.
But Medvedev has taken pains to say he is a changed man and credits this new-found attitude as the reason he is playing in his third Australian Open final.
Instead of shooting at someone in the crowd or provoking his opponent with questionable tactics during a match, the No. 3 tries to let things flow.
Even during an epic semi-final against his nemesis Alexander Zverev, Medvedev managed to keep his cool even when he was two sets down and on the brink.
“I want change, I want to become a better person, because I don’t like these labels, ‘a better person’. Who knows what a better person is?” he said.
“I just want to be better with myself. To not have these moments after the matches where I thought: I did this with the crowd, was it right, was it wrong, why did I do it? Did it help me on the field? Didn’t it help me?
“I just don’t want it anymore. I want to play tennis, I want to be proud of myself, I want to fight and stuff like that.
“Can this help me win all these games? Possibly yes. But I don’t want to say yes either. I decided this a month ago and then suddenly I’m winning all these competitions. Life isn’t that easy.
“But I’m doing what I told myself to do a month ago. I am happy with it and look forward to the future.”
At the end of last season, Medvedev did something he hadn’t done in years: he took an extended break. He was mentally and physically burned out and while recharging his batteries in the Maldives, the genesis of his new Zen-like approach was born.
“It was during my vacation, so I think it was like the first vacation, let’s say, a pre-season vacation, that I had in maybe four or five years. I think the last one was in 2020, so a long time,” Medvedev said.
“For whatever reason, my mind didn’t dwell on that because at the end of the season I felt mentally very tired, very tired. So every match I play, something would bother me, I would, you know, have that with the crowd, with someone else. I wouldn’t be 100 percent okay with myself.
“So on this holiday I tried some new things, some new breathing exercises, whatever. I thought, wow, that feels good. I now know a little more about my body. I know a little more about my mind. Maybe I know a little more about why things happen.
“Where before I just said: okay, this happened. Let’s look to the future. Where now I’m trying to, okay, why is this happening, because I’m like this. So what can I do now, tomorrow, today.
“I just decided I want to try it. The hardest part is that sometimes you forget it in a week. You just move it away. It happened to me once, I had an injury and for a week I thought, okay, now I’m going to change my mind and within a month it was gone.
“So I don’t know how long it’s going to work, but so far I’m 100 percent into it, and when I’m 100 percent into something, I tend to do it until the end.”
The endgame is winning his second Grand Slam title.
This will be his sixth appearance in a major final and his only success comes in 2021, when he defeated Novak Djokovic in straight sets at the US Open.
He lost consecutive Australian Opens in 2021-2022, the first to Djokovic in three sets and fell short to Rafael Nadal in a five-set epic 12 months later.
The man standing in his way on Sunday evening is rising Italian star Jannik Sinner. The pair have played nine times, with Medvedev winning the first six meetings, but he has been on the wrong side of the ledger for the past three matches.
“There wasn’t too much of a tactical change when he won the last three,” Medvedev said. “He did a little more serve-and-volley, maybe a little more aggressive, but at the same time that’s what he does against everyone. He just plays better.
“The three games were all tough. Two tiebreaks and two three-setters, so I had my chances.
“They were all at the end of the season where I felt like I wasn’t at 100 percent, even though I was playing quite well, but I was maybe at 97, 96. And against him you have to be at 100.
“He is playing better than before, especially at the end of the season he started playing at a completely different level. So if I want to beat him, I have to take my level to a completely different level, and I will try to do that.”
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