Kyrgios to blast back at Brisbane

Nick Kyrgios will make his long awaited return to tournament tennis when he plays at the Brisbane International starting on 29 December.

Kyrgios has played just one tour-level match since a quarter-final loss at the 2022 US Open. At one stage the Australian was told his career was over due to a wrist injury.

Successful surgery in Adelaide has given him another shot at achieving his goal of winning a grand slam singles title.

“It was a wrist reconstruction, so there was four holes drilled in my hand, and there’s a piece of string kind of holding my wrist together and my fingers looked like sausages when I got out of the surgery,” said Kyrgios, who won the Brisbane International in 2018.

“I was in a cast for about 12 weeks, no movement, and I basically just had to relearn how to use my right wrist again, even just carrying grocery bags, anything was super painful.

“But then I started getting some real improvement at the nine-month mark … to a point where I feel like I’m playing how I was in 2022.”

Kyrgios found inspiration when hitting with Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon earlier this year. It was of course Djokovic that halted Kyrgios title ambitions in the 2022 Wimbledon final.

“I was hitting with Novak and when he said to me, ‘It doesn’t look like you’ve had surgery’, and that was a big motivation to say like maybe I’m actually making some inroads and some progress into getting back because I didn’t really know.

“That was a big drive for me … so, if he didn’t say that, I don’t know if I would have been motivated and if I would have kept pushing on the thought, but that was definitely a big part of the journey when he said that to me.”

With the announcement that Kyrgios is playing in Brisbane, it is bad news for Canberrans. There was talk that the Canberra local might play in the Canberra International which is on at the same time. The Canberra International is held at the same venue where Kyrgios does a lot of on-court work.

Also lining up in Brisbane will be fellow Australians Jordan Thompson, Alexei Popyrin and Ajla Tomljanovic.