Day 6 Under the lights: Halys changes the script

Quentin Halys has experienced both sides of that coin. When he first began his Roland-Garros journey, he wanted everything to be perfect – and it wasn’t. He won one match in his first seven visits. Last year he reached the third round but after taking the fight to Holger Rune, he could not maintain it in the fifth set.

Now, older, wiser and having learned his lesson, the 29-year-old thinks he is ready to take on Alexander Zverev. He is not guaranteeing that he will win but he is promising not to make the same mistakes as against Rune.

“I'm going to use that experience to try to better manage my match,” he said. “I think that what I did last year is already useful to me, and I hope I will continue to build on that against Zverev. He's an incredible player on clay court but all of the small mistakes I made last year, I'm going to try to get rid of them and to play my very best tennis.”

That is easier said than done but Halys has taken some bold decisions to prepare for this week and he thinks they may just pay off. He went straight from the hard courts of Miami to the clay without any time to adjust. His results were ordinary at best. Then, after Madrid, he opted to skip the Masters 1000 in Rome and, instead, go to play a Challenger in Bordeaux to get some matches under his belt. He reached the semi-finals.

“At my level, I can't make a mountain out of Roland-Garros,” the world No.90 said, “because I can't come into the tournament to say I'm going to go through to the end and win. That's not true. But I must come along in the best condition with a lot of confidence. That’s why I went to Bordeaux, for example. For me that's the best preparation to try and go as far as I can in this Roland-Garros, and now there is a third match, so it's cool.”

As for Zverev, we know all about his record here: a final, three semifinals and a quarterfinal in the past five years. He has the serve, the power, the accuracy on his groundstrokes, the movement, the reach – he is a contender here. He also has a win over Halys already. He won their only meeting in Miami in straight sets earlier this year.

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