Novak Djokovic has defined his situation with the courts on the Rome Masters. The six-time champion in Italy complained there was too much clay throughout his first two matches of the event. And he has now urged bosses to name in specialists from the French Open after claiming they have been used 10 years in the past.

Djokovic has already had his finest clay event of the 12 months up to now in Rome, as he received back-to-back matches over Tomas Etcheverry and Grigor Dimitrov. But the highest seed nonetheless confronted some hassle within the matches - going a break down in his opening spherical and dropping a set to Dimitrov.

And in each matches, the Serb aired his grievances over the courtroom - claiming there was an excessive amount of clay and asking for the baseline to be swept. Djokovic has now clarified the difficulty with the courts as he known as on the event boss to usher in French Open specialists.

“I mean, Rome never had a great reputation for the quality of the court, to be honest with you,” he mentioned after advancing to the round-of-16. “Even although I do know all the fellows, Marco is the chief of workers of the fellows who're taking good care of the courts. I take into account them mates. I've identified them for 15 years, and I get together with them very properly. Again, I can not blame them for this."

The 35-year-old then explained that he thought there wasn’t enough play on the courts ahead of the tournament, making the quality worse. He continued: “What is interesting would be to understand how much tennis they're playing on the court actually before the tournament starts. I think the other year I was asking, and they were not playing much at all. They played pre-qualies.

“If you don't use the court, and you have a clay court, these things happen. The court breaks. You have many holes. You have uneven surface, really bad bounces, a lot of clay.” While Djokovic said the problems were part and parcel of playing on the dirt, he urged tournament officials to call in the French Open experts as they did 10 years ago.

“Look, it's part of the clay court season, so we have to accept the fact that you're going to have lots of uneven, irregular bounces,” he said. “In Rome, it has been happening quite a few years.