http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/sport/...-1226245940813

IT'S hard to play tennis when you can barely walk.

 Unfortunately that's exactly what happened in my first-round match against Australian Greg Jones.


Somehow I won through to the second round in five sets, but it was a struggle the whole way.


I do have a blood condition called Gilbert's Syndrome and I feared that it raised its head at the worst possible time.


I hope it's not that, just that something else is wrong with my body. But against Jones as he won the first two sets on Margaret Court Arena, I was literally standing there on court.


I couldn't do anything. Then luckily, Greg helped me with some mistakes in the third set, and then had problems himself in the fourth and fifth sets with a leg injury.


But to be honest, it was a pretty ugly match.

How did I turn around a game that looked like it was gone?
To be honest, I don't know how.


He helped me a lot and I couldn't say I really played much better.
I went to the toilet after the second set and just thought how did I have to play differently? I tried to risk more and he helped me a bit so everything just went the way it went.


I won't do anything special to recover. I feel fine now. I was a bit frustrated to feel so bad. I was breathing hard because my heart was going too fast and I had no power to play.


There's nothing much I can do. My tennis isn't the concern for my next match, it's my health.


When you are feeling like that all you can do is stay on the court. If it was any other tournament I would have pulled out probably, but because it's a Grand Slam you just stand there and hope it's a mistake of the body which might go away.
I was feeling fine coming into the match and thought during the match that I just wasn't warmed up, but during the match I started feeling worse and worse and couldn't understand what to do because I couldn't get one ball into the court. It was even tough to walk. To be honest I just wanted to get off the court. I didn't really care, but it happened that I won in five sets.


He gave away a lot of points, I gave away a lot of points, but I am in the next round and I will work really hard to try to get myself back into the tournament.
Next up is German Tobias Kamke. I am not too concerned about looking at him, it's more about my health.


I could play Bernard Tomic in the third round if I beat my Kamke, and I have won against him three times before, but you never know what is going to happen in the second round. I need to get myself right before my Round 2 match on Wednesday first, and all I will be thinking about is hoping that my body quickly recovers in time for my next match.

I was thinking about tossing Dolgo into a parlay, but this is the reason it is almost impossible to feel good about betting on him ... the blood disease he has is a 100% factor that you can't really cap from match to match. I looked up info on the disease and symptoms are:

feeling tired all the time (fatigue), difficulty maintaining concentration, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, loss of weight and others

Just thought I would pass this along as it was an interesting read and good insight into his first round difficulty.