Paris (AFP)

For more than a year, the show given by Benoit Paire, a mixture of botched matches, provocative statements, but also a lively discomfort since the start of the pandemic, has caused pain at best, often pain. 'annoyance.

What about the season of the player, still 40th player in the world despite 14 defeats in his last 16 matches, and who appears at Roland Garros in the skin of a condemned in the first round against the Norwegian Casper Ruud (15th in the world) ?

"Pathetic" for some, "painful" for the most compassionate.

"Yes I am going through a difficult period," he admitted on Twitter on Friday.

"I am not asking you to understand me or to love me," he added, before claiming public support for the Parisian Grand Slam which begins on Sunday.

"The only thing I ask of you is that we have a great Roland Garros. Whether there is victory or defeat, let's just enjoy this moment and have fun! I need you to set things on fire. "

The Avignon has never hidden it: the sanitary conditions and the closed doors surrounding the tournaments for more than a year, the absence of the public and all the sidelines of what made the salt of his life of before, affect it to the highest point.

One way to explain his many parodies of matches and his poor results.

That is for the bottom.

The form, embellished with defeats punctuated by some insults and spitting, is more questionable.

"Whether I win or lose, I don't care, it goes light years away", declared the Frenchman after his defeat in the 1st round in Monte-Carlo, before launching: "I ' took 12,000 euros to be in a quiet hotel, then I go home, that's perfect ".

- "Need the gaze of others" -

A media outlet, one more, which had finished convincing the French Tennis Federation (FFT) to dismiss him from the Tokyo Olympics, which he could have claimed with his frozen ranking due to the Covid.

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These repeated statements on an alleged detachment vis-à-vis his defeats in relation to the money he earns, degrade his public image, like some of his hitches on Twitter, the most recent with the ex- Davis Cup captain and now consultant on Eurosport, Jean-Paul Loth.

The one who had in particular had to manage another strong head of French tennis in the 1980s, Yannick Noah, had qualified Benoit Paire as a "mountebank" after yet another match without tail or head.

The latter had not let pass, asking if Jean-Paul Loth, 79, was really "the old man".

But all this badly hides two evils that have struck Benoit Paire since the start of the pandemic: he is not playing well and he is not doing well.

And these two quests are intimately linked with him.

The player's mother told L'Equipe daily that her son "needs the eyes of others", and that when "he starts to fail, that's where it can go wrong."

And Benoit Paire has been missing too much for months.

His lack of appetite for training and physical work, which he usually manages to overcome, does not help him in this period.

- "Want to help him" -

"He is in a vicious circle where he feels that he is not playing as well as he would like, but at the same time he does not do everything necessary to come back. Suddenly, he lets go a little", analyzes in the Team one of his friends on the circuit, Édouard Roger-Vasselin.

Despite his escapades, his behavior more than limited on the ground, the executives of French tennis do not want to let go.

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"The period is extremely complicated for Benoît, he has a lot of trouble, explained the national technical director (DTN) Nicolas Escudé just after his exclusion from the Olympics. We are not here to want to hit him even more on the head, we is there to want to help him ".

The only clearing seen for months in Madrid, with a victory against Georgian Nikoloz Basilashvili (31st), almost a month ago, unfortunately did not trigger the hoped-for burst.

And for his last tournament before setting foot on the Parisian clay, Benoit Paire gave up on Tuesday in the middle of a match in Parma, claiming a sore throat, while he was led 7-5, 3-1 by the Spaniard Jaume Munar ( 80th).

A classic finally for him this season, but one that the meager Parisian public will not forgive Porte d'Auteuil.

© 2021 AFP