By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Sunday July 9, 2023

Denis Shapovalov has been hampered by – and playing through – a serious knee injury, and it came back to bite him once again at Wimbledon, as he experienced pain and his performance fell off a cliff in a 3-6 6-3 6-1 6-3 loss to Russia’s Roman Safiullin.

The Canadian has been bothered by the injury for a while, and even considered skipping the clay season and most of the grass season, with a plan to return at Wimbledon, but decided to try to play on and manage the pain instead.

“First and foremost, hopefully I can get healthy soon,” Shapovalov said. “Hopefully I can solve the problem with the knee. Yeah, try to fix it. Happy it didn't flare up in the first round, but at the same time, it's difficult to play tennis when, yeah, when I had the issue that I have.”

Shapovalov, who reached the round of 16 despite the difficulties, is now contemplating shutting down his season for a while to conduct a more extensive rehab.

The 29th-ranked Canadian, aged 24, is 13-13 on the season.

“It's normal because I haven't done a full recovery on it,” he said of the injury. “It's not shocking that it happened. It is disappointing, obviously. Obviously it felt like I was playing good tennis, and had chances today to maybe get into the quarterfinals.

It’s definitely something that I need to fix fully. Maybe do the full treatment on it. Take more time off of tennis to really fix it. Because, yeah, they basically said until I get stronger it's going to kind of be like this. That's if I want to keep playing.

Shapovalov declined to talk more about the injury, other than saying it has bothered him throughout his career, and started to flare up again last fall.

Asked how long a proper recovery might take, he said:

“I think the minimum would be two months. Yeah, I mean, hopefully no surgery,” he said. “Obviously with surgery it would be much longer, but I would say the minimum would be two months.”