Roger Federer is watching the local excitement build for his third round needle match at the Australian Open against Bernard Tomic.
The 20-year-old challenger is the talk of the tennis-starved public after winning his first career title last weekend in Sydney and coming into his meeting with the Swiss with a 10-0 record in 2013.
But as a 17-time Grand Slam champion and arguably the best to ever play the game, Federer has lived through countless days of hype many times. His solution: just ignore it.
“I don’t read the press, so it doesn’t affect me. I don’t know if he’s going to wake up and first thing in the morning, and go to the coffee shop and read the paper.
“I used to be like that when I was a lot younger, and I stopped doing it a long time ago. It has a big effect on you if you care what people write about you and think of you. I think it’s important to be confident to a degree, you know. It seems he has that.
“Now obviously we both have to live up to a big match, big hype, and then we can talk about it afterwards. Right now I’m still at the beginning of the season. He’s obviously played a bit more. So he knows more so where he is with his game. So it’s an interesting matchup right now I think for both of us.”
