Holger Rune holds no grudges “against the Spanish people” following his run in with Alejandro Davidovich-Fokina and the Madrid Open crowd at the ATP Masters 1000 tournament.

The Dane suffered a 7-6 (7-1), 5-7, 7-6 (7-5) defeat at the hands of local hope Davidovich-Fokina in the third round on Sunday evening, but it was a heated affair as he was booed by the crowd and he also received a lecture from the chair umpire.

Davidovich Fokina was unhappy with a line call from the electronic FoxTenn computer system and had a lengthy discussion with umpire Carlos Bernardes and an ATP supervisor.

Rune, who was already feeling the wrath of the crowd after he appeared to clear a mark from earlier in the first set, also got involved in the heated debate.

The sixth seed was booed by the crowd and Bernardes got involved, telling the youngster: “I’m going to tell you one thing and that’s it for the whole match. I told you once in Monte Carlo but that was fine. There are crowds that you cannot control if you do things like that.”

Rune replied: “But I didn’t do anything today.”

The official hit back: “For them, what you did, because he was complaining… They will be ever worse if you keep doing. If you just play tennis, they don’t do anything else.

“I’m just trying to help you to go through this because I have experience here, that you cannot play if they start to do it. For the, what you did was erasing the mark. But [there] was no reason for that, okay?”

The 20-year-old, though, insisted that he did nothing wrong and took to social media to express his feelings on the matter.

“There was a lot of talk today about bad behaviour among Spanish fans last night. Yesterday the crowd didn’t understand what was going on,” he wrote.”You cannot overrule a computer call and it took the umpire and supervisor very long time to explain this to my opponent.

“And they didn’t bother to communicate this to the crowd, next time I will take a nap while they discuss. Just want to say that personally I hold nothing against the Spanish people and I look forward to coming back.”

Rune also received support from commentator Mark Petchey.

“@holgerrune2003 did nothing wrong in that match. Sometimes you have to expect you are going to be the unintentional villain when playing a home player. Great entertainment. Super intense,” he wrote on Twitter.

The article ‘Unintentional villain’ Holger Rune fires back after Madrid Open drama – ‘Next time I will take a nap’ appeared first on Tennis365.com.