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By Simon Briggs
A move to Dubai is the latest phase in the mid-career reinvention of Dan Evans, the British No1, who will probably claim a new personal best on the rankings ladder if he beats Australia’s Alexei Popyrin.
Evans is the latest British tennis star to find a new residence outside of the UK, following Kyle Edmund’s relocation to the Bahamas in 2017. He says that he decided on the move after practising in Dubai during last year’s British Covid lockdowns.
As Evans explained on Wednesday, after his second-round victory over the USA’s Marcos Giron, “It just made a bit more sense if I could travel in and out of there rather than being stuck in Britain if there was to be another lockdown.
“I decided to reside there for the future,” Evans added, “just as somewhere to practise outdoors a lot more, rather than being at home and practising indoors at the NTC [National Tennis Centre].”
The win over Giron took Evans to 19 tour-level victories for the season, equalling the personal record he set last year. Should he beat Popyrin on Friday, he will also bring his total prizemoney for 2021 up to around £675,000 – which would match his total for 2020 with two months of tennis still to come.
He also has a good chance of ending this tournament in the high 20s on the rankings chart – probably at No23 or 24. Not bad when you consider that Evans was the world 190 as recently as the start of the 2019 season, having lost a year to a ban for recreational cocaine use.
In hindsight, that apparently self-destructive error proved to be the making of him, convincing him to finally cut out the late nights and embrace a healthy lifestyle. “If you get another chance, it’s probably your best chance,” he has said. “If you don’t take the first one, really go after the second.”
At 31, Evans is now an established and well-travelled member of the locker-room. And yet, he could hardly be described as a veteran in a sport where Novak Djokovic is still the grand panjandrum at the age of 34. This is his chance to make up for lost time.
One motivation for the move is that Evans feels less than enthusiastic about the heavy sports-science emphasis at the NTC (the Lawn Tennis Association’s headquarters in south-west London). As he said in an interview shortly before Wimbledon, “In British tennis we over-complicate it. The sport is not a science. The players need to hit a lot of tennis balls and get incredibly fit … I struggle with it when I hear around the LTA that it’s not a running sport.”
Despite turning in a solid season, Evans still stands at risk of being overtaken in the rankings by his friend and rival Cameron Norrie, who has won a remarkable 37 matches on the tour already this season. Neither man has a really big shot in their kit-bag to fall back on, so they both have to work tremendously hard, taking pride in their mobility and endurance.
“Cam and I have not been using their [the LTA’s] trainers at the NTC, which I’m not sure is an accident,” Evans said in that same pre-Wimbledon interview with the Daily Mail. “Part of the game is staying on the court.”
It has been difficult for Evans to regain the same momentum on this American trip, because of an untimely bout of Covid after Wimbledon which sapped his strength and fitness levels. He will need all his famous footspeed to sneak past the big-hitting Popyrin.
