Mikhail Kukushkin

It's a tough look.

I think one of the other big storylines in Albany was Mikhail Kukushkin, our wild card into the hottie bracket a couple years ago.

His last event, he won his first round, then went out to Tsitsipas.

Kukushkin was tricky, though, all those years.

We played him.

Couldn't stand playing that guy.

Couldn't stand playing him.

He lost to Tsitsipas, and afterwards Tsitsipas... put a shirt out and had Kukushkin sign the shirt like soccer players after this great career.

Who was it? Goffin and someone else.

Kukushkin.

Yeah, yeah, who bowed out in Almaty.

Yeah, good old Kukushkin.

I saw him, I'm going to say, make the semis in Porto just two years ago.

And the tennis still seemed to be very much there at that point.

He beat him in three.

Kukushkin is about to retire, so I was kind of shocked that he actually won a match in this event.

Tsitsipas beat him, and he beat Duckworth, who I think is very good.

So it's been a very, very easy draw for Tsitsipas so far.

Shout out 2021.

Again, Kukushkin in what I believe is his final event, 6-6 of the qualifier.

Seco Lardis, he'll now take on Stefano Tsitsipas.

Could be his last match.

You want to see some beautiful forehands, some one-handed backhands? That's the one for you.

We learned Kukushkin.

I think this might be his last event, obviously, to play in Kazakhstan.

Someone who's represented Kazakhstan for as long as he has.

Basically, we have Davi Goffin, the Belgian, who I have extremely fond memories of as a player, really enjoyed watching him, nice person, always enjoyed his game.

Davy Goffin is retiring and he's bowing out at home in Brussels in the European Open we'll see in the draw in a couple of minutes time and then in Almaty you have I believe it was a wild card for Mikhail Kukushkin and Mikhail Kukushkin correct me if I'm wrong anybody in the comments but I'm pretty sure that Mikhail Kukushkin was the trailblazer moving across from Russian tennis to Kazakh tennis and one of the first ones paving the way there along with Andrei Golubev and a few others at the time and obviously like the most famous and the most successful there of all of those to come across was Elena Rybakina and actually I had some people I did another reel earlier last week I'm still making the effort as you can tell with the reels even in this kind of down part of the season but I did a reel about you know Zheng Chen Wen versus Alex Ayala who's the bigger superstar and obviously I'm trying to get a little bit of it's a little bit of baiting and it's a little bit of trying to get people to just comment because obviously Zheng Chen Wen has a much higher ceiling than Alex Ayala but Ayala in a sponsor sense I guess you know she's a massive superstar as well and she has the whole of the Philippines behind her and that's literally a whole country behind her you could argue the same for Zheng Chen Wen with China but I had people in the comments I was basically saying who's the biggest star in Asia out of those two and I had some people in the comments saying obviously the biggest tennis star in Asia is Elena Rybakina and I'm like it's fucking not like she's the best female tennis player yeah but like So is she Asian? She's not to me.

Like sorry I'm not having it.

She was born in Moscow.

I just feel like he has a pep in his step at the moment, which is not something I expected, to be honest.

I thought his career was basically done.

Mikhail Kukushkin is down here, Miomar Kesmanovic and Luciano Darderi.

So Darderi, I guess, is interesting enough.