WIMBLEDON
Date: 2007-06-26

WIMBLEDON

June 26, 2007

Marat Safin
LONDON, ENGLAND
Question How do you think you played today?
Marat Safin Well, for the conditions, first match at Wimbledon is pretty tough to play well, so kind of nervous at the beginning, and a difficult match with the guy I played. It was okay the first match, I think.

Question You're up against Qureshi next from Pakistan. Do you know much about this guy?
Marat Safin Neither. I don't even know how he looks unfortunately. I guess he's playing pretty good tennis if he passed the quallie, he qualified, he won the three-set match today. So I guess tough opponent second round. We'll see how it's going to be.

Question Are you going to have your spies out doing some research on this guy?
Marat Safin Not really, not really (smiling). We'll see tomorrow.

Question Is there anything that you feel you need to practice on after today's game? Is there anything you thought was missing from the way you played?
Marat Safin Not really. I played another match, and just a little bit of confidence. Everything is up to the confidence. Even if you're playing bad, you win a couple of matches, then you might have a surprise and start to play well and you start to make some results. I'll play the next match, and I face Federer in the third round. That's my goal, and then see how it's going to go. First of all, let's play tomorrow, see how it's -- hopefully everything will end up in a nice way, and then it's going to be the next match. Not really looking too far.

Question Do you have the confidence at the moment?
Marat Safin No, I don't.

Question You have no confidence at the moment?
Marat Safin I have no confidence at the moment.

Question How come? What's wrong with your confidence?
Marat Safin Well, because I'm not winning a lot of matches lately, because I've been struggling for the past couple of months, more than a couple of months. So how are you going to build up the confidence? The confidence comes with winning matches and playing a lot of semifinals, finals. The last time I played the semifinal was in March, so that's where my confidence has left me.

Question How did you feel when your confidence was at your lowest?
Marat Safin Well, just try to make small goals and try to play -- try to pick up any moments, any matches, and then whenever I have a big-time breakthrough, then that's what counts. But you need to pick up all the small matches and play set by set, match by match and game by game.

Question You said you've got Federer in the third round if you get past Qureshi. You've beaten him before at the Australian Open.
Marat Safin Yeah, I need to play my next match against Qureshi so let's look at this one first. My position shouldn't be looking any farther than my second round match.

Question Do you think people worry too much about Federer, get too nervous when they play him, give him too much respect?
Marat Safin I don't really think about Federer. Any other players don't really, really care, and why should I care about them?