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Miami Open: Pain-free Novak Djokovic focused on enjoying tennis once again

The Serbian tennis star is planning to return at the Miami Masters, after a six-month injury lay-off.

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Former world number one Novak Djokovic, who has been troubled by injury lately, has said that he is playing without pain after a long time.

The Serbian tennis star is planning to return at the Miami Masters, after a six-month injury lay-off. The elbow injury sidelined him for six months after he was forced to retire at the quarter-finals of Wimbledon last year. He underwent a surgery for the same in February. 

"The last few days have been the first days in long, long time that I could actually focus on the game rather than have something in my mind always worried whether I'm going to have pain or not, and usually it happened," Djokovic said ahead of his the Miami Open. "It's quite refreshing because everything else was pain involved."

 

The Serbian has played only five matches this season. He was earlier knocked out of the Indian Wells Masters and the Australian Open. "This year is a special year for this tournament because it's the last year on Key Biscayne. So we're going to all try to enjoy it, and take the best out of it," Djokovic said.

"I actually started playing pain-free in the last two days. It's quite refreshing because everything else had pain involved. The last few days have been first in a long, long time that I could actually be focused on the game rather than have something in my mind and be worried about whether I am going to have pain or not.

 

"I have learned a lot about myself," he said. "It's been a great, great blessing to go through this. I've been very successful in this sport over the course of the last six, seven years and I've been very grateful to go through that. But I obviously have had to face different circumstances, situations that I've never faced before. Ever since I started professional tennis my trajectory was always going in the right direction and that has changed," he added.

"So I had to open up and figure out things, how to move forward and get inspired and be the best version I can be. It's one of the ways to warm up and get my body and my mind synchronized with a certain motion that I would like to have with my serve because that's where I kind of compromise my elbow. So I'm trying to strengthen the muscles and get into a certain motion that would support the best possible serve.

 

"I am not yet at my best. Every day is a process for me and it's an opportunity to learn, to grow and get better after the two years of injury and trying to figure out ways how to play pain-free. I have had to modify a lot of things in my game to accept it. When I made this intervention, obviously it's pretty invasive and unfortunately in the end it had to be done. It also carries certain consequences but right now, I'm not playing with the pain which is the most important thing. All I can do now is to try to embrace the process every day," said Djokovic.

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