Daniil Medvedev has produced some classic on-court theatrics at the Indian Wells Open this week, but he admits he needs to change as it doesn’t really help him during matches.

Unimpressed by the slow hard-courts at Indian Wells, Medvedev threatened to “take 25 minutes to pee” during his win over Ilya Ivashka in the third round.

And he was again at it during his fourth-round defeat of Alexander Zverev on Tuesday as he complained multiple times to the chair official about the surface.

“Should be banned from playing here. Freakin’ disgrace to the sport. This freakin’ court, man,” he ranted during his latest match.

“They call it hard court. What a shame to call this awful court a hard court. I’ll go to the toilet, but I don’t care, give me a time violation. I’m going to be as slow as this court, again. I don’t care.

“Give me five time violations. I’ll go in one minute. If they allow us to play on such a court then I can allow myself to do whatever I want.”

WATCH: Daniil Medvedev rolls ankle, calls court a disgrace, produces epic rant, beats Alexander Zverev

Asked during his post-match press conference if expressing his opinion during matches helps him, he replied: “Not at all. I do think it actually distracts me and I would be better just shutting up and playing. That’s what I should do. But at the same time, that’s how I am.

“When I was much younger, I was actually much worse. I tried to mature, if we can say like this. I do think that in many aspects of my life and in my tennis career I matured a lot. And better than I was three, four years ago.

“The attitude I had on the court today and with Ivashka was immature. But what else can I say? That’s also this high-intensity sport where you are one on one against the opponent brings the heat out of you. Some players are capable of controlling it better than the others. Some are controlling it less, like me.

“That’s my character, and that’s my personality, also.”

Medvedev has a long history of on-court antics as he famously called out the spectators at the 2019 US Open for booing him during a match, saying he won the match “because of them”.

“I want all of you to know when you sleep tonight, I won because of you,” the Russian said as the booing continued. “The more you do this, the more I will win for you guys.”

He was also asked about what work he is doing to change his on-court behaviour.

“I do think working with a mental coach, the previous one I had, Francisca, helped me a lot to, first of all, mature as a person, and that helped me mature on the tennis court, talking even about winning titles and getting better results. Because that’s also, in my opinion, if you are, yeah, immature, it’s going to be tougher to do it. That helped me a lot.

“I feel like many times I’m capable of — I mean, the thing is that you cannot constantly do, let’s call it, errors and then apologise and say, You see, I apologise so that’s mature. No, but I’m capable of seeing many times my mistakes. Sometimes not. Sometimes if a person comes to me and says, You did a mistake. I say, No, I don’t think so. Then that’s also your opinion.

“But sometimes I’m capable of seeing this, and then telling myself, okay, maybe next time I have to try to do better. Again, if this would happen when I was 16 years old, I would not like something about the court, about myself, about my game today, I don’t even want to say what happened, but it would be much worse than it is right now.

“But that’s something I’m going to try to work throughout my whole career, because I want to be remembered not definitely for my tantrums but more for my game and for my good parts of my personality.

“I want to, yeah, have good relationship with all the guys on the court, because I can also understand that this can distract my opponent, and that’s not what I want. I don’t care to win a match distracting my opponent. I want to win it normally.

“That’s something I work on constantly. I’m sure I’m going to only improve and improve on this case.”

The article Daniil Medvedev not a fan of his own ‘immature’ antics – ‘I don’t want to be remembered for my tantrums’ appeared first on Tennis365.com.