Wimbledon 2018: Kyle Edmund and Swedish coach Fredrik Rosengren bring World Cup rivalry to SW19
Rosengren, a proud Swede, and the football-loving Edmund have already been sharing a joke or two ahead of Saturday’s big match in Samara
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Your support makes all the difference.Kyle Edmund and his coach, Frederik Rosengren, are too professional to consider looking beyond the British No 1’s second-round meeting with Bradley Klan here on Thursday, but consider this potential scenario.
If Edmund beats Klahn, a 27-year-old American ranked No 168 in the world, his next match – potentially against Novak Djokovic – will be on Saturday, perhaps at the same time as England are taking on Sweden in the quarter-finals of the World Cup.
Rosengren, a proud Swede, and the football-loving Edmund have already been sharing a joke or two ahead of Saturday’s big match in Samara. “We will be friends for a couple more days and then we see,” Rosengren said with a smile.
What has the coach made of his country’s footballers? “Yesterday was unbelievable,” he said. “Everyone is one for all, all for one. Good defence and they are so good when they play better teams. They can't dictate the games. To dictate the game, they need Zlatan [Ibrahimovic] and these guys. In this case, they do so well when they play the big nations. I think they have a good chance actually.”
He added: “England are a great team and that is why I believe in Sweden more. I was cheering for England yesterday, I have to say. It’s a good match-up.”
Rosengren said the World Cup was proving a good distraction for Edmund. “You can’t talk or think about tennis 24 hours a day,” he said. “He has to relax between. He has to be switched on when he is working and we are talking or whatever. But he is a young guy and he deserves to have fun also.”
The coach said it was never easy to play in your home Grand Slam tournament. For Edmund there is the added pressure of being the highest ranked British singles player, but Rosengren said that the world No 17 had handled all the extra attention well.
“He is really relaxed,” Rosengren said. “He has done it really well, this transition from being 55 or 60 in the world to being top 20. And of course there will be even more attention if he makes it to the top 10, so I try to prepare for that.”
Rosengren said he had enjoyed watching the way that Edmund had relished the opportunity to play in front of his home crowd when he beat Alex Bolt on Court One on Tuesday.
He also sees no reason why Edmund cannot do well on grass. “He has to go to the tournaments and think he can win,” he said. “He has to go to Eastbourne after Queen’s and think he can win because he has that level.
“When I see Kyle on grass, no problems at all. The way he moves on the grass has been very, very good. And with the movement, then he can do his strokes. And his strokes are good.”
He added: “We really think and believe that he can beat everybody. For me there’s absolutely no reason to think he can’t, because for me it is much, much more about the mental game. I think he has the strokes, all the tools that it takes to be very, very successful on this surface.”
Rosengren said that beating Andy Murray at Eastbourne last week had been an important moment for Edmund. “For him, of course it was a big match to win, to play his mentor, his idol when he was growing up,” he said. “The way he handled that one was amazing to see. Sometimes he is unbelievably mentally strong.”
The coach said that Klahn, a left-hander, would offer a similar challenge to that provided by Bolt. “That is good because we spent two days preparing for Bolt and we don’t need to change too much for the second round,” he said. “The practice today was fantastic. He made an unbelievably good practice. He kept the energy and he kept the intensity.”
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