As if playing Novak Djokovic or Andy Murray in the French Open final was not a tough enough task, Stan Wawrinka will probably have to deal with a hostile Roland Garros crowd on Sunday.
The Swiss eighth seed beat France's Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the semi-finals on Friday, facing boos from sections of the court Philippe Chatrier crowd after the match.
Wawrinka was probably paying for the comments he made after the Davis Cup final when he said the French, who lost 3-1 on home clay in Lille, should have talked less, adding that the Swiss had let their rackets do the talking.
Wawrinka had already been whistled by the crowd ahead of his fourth-round encounter with another Frenchman, Gilles Simon.
"So it's happened to me before. I have the impression that what happened during the Davis Cup last year -- as I said before, I said things that maybe had gone too far," Wawrinka said after his 6-3, 6-7(1), 7-6(3), 6-4 win over Tsonga.
"But I didn't want to harm anybody. I wasn't nasty against anybody. You know, it's about joking... but the crowd will remember, you know," he told a news conference.
"They just remember what I said and not what had happened before, vis-a-vis the French players."
Wawrinka, who will play the winner of the Djokovic-Murray semi-final that followed his match on Friday, said he was not the kind of player to wind up the fans.
"I don't think I'm the bad guy. I don't think I'm someone who's quarrelling with anybody or looking for that type of thing, that type of reaction from the crowd," he said.
"I'm here to play my matches. That's all. But, you know, it's like when I defeated Simon and I thanked the crowd. You know, I will thank them and walk away. No problem."
With this win over Tsonga, Wawrinka can join all-time greats Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray as only the fifth man in the past decade to win multiple majors
Confident after his semi-final victory, he said, “When I play my best, I know I could beat all the players”.
He also insisted that he has been playing really well since the beginning of the tournament and has been really focused on the way he was playing, on the way he was dealing mentally with my pressure and with the way he wanted to go into the tournament.
After defeating Djokovic and Nadal to win last year's Australian Open in spectacular fashion and sweeping past Federer on route to the final in Paris, Wawrinka feels ready to go past one-slam wonder success.
Australia's former world number one Lleyton Hewitt is the only other active player to have landed at least two slams.
