Kyle Edmund reaping the rewards of new partnership with Fredrik Rosengren at Australian Open

Rosengren has coached a number of top players – including Magnus Norman and Robin Soderling – and is now helping Edmund to take his game to the next level

Kyle Edmund with physical performance coach Ian Prangley (l) and coach Fredrik Rosengren (Getty)

Fredrik Rosengren is as outgoing and passionate as Kyle Edmund is laid-back and down-to-earth, but it seems that the relationship between coach and player could not be better. The affection that the 57-year-old Swede has for the 23-year-old Briton shines through when he talks about him.

It is also clear that Rosengren likes the fact that Edmund has his feet firmly on the ground. “I’m not expecting Kyle to run out tomorrow and buy a Ferrari,” Rosengren said here on Wednesday on the eve of Edmund’s Australian Open semi-final against Marin Cilic.

“I have worked with players who would definitely buy a Ferrari the next day and I’ve worked with tennis players who would share a Volkswagen Polo with their mother, so I’ve been through all this stuff.”

Rosengren, who forms a tightly-knit team with Mark Hilton, Dan Evans’ former coach, and Ian Prangley, Edmund’s long-time physical trainer and physiotherapist, is passionate about his work but is also delighted that his man is enjoying his time in the spotlight.

In preparation for the biggest match of his life Edmund practised today with Thomas Johansson, the 2002 champion here and a good friend of Rosengren’s. “It was good, a lot of fun,” Rosengren said. “I think Kyle realises more and more that his life has changed. I hope he enjoys it a lot. This comes with the success.

“It will help him a lot with his self-esteem to improve as a person to handle all these things. He’s a very down-to-earth, polite guy.

“He’s very humble, but at the same time I think it’s very good for his personality to have this feeling that he’s so good in something. This can help him as a person – and of course as a player as well.”

Rosengren began work with Edmund at the start of the year (Getty)

Rosengren, who has coached a number of top players including Magnus Norman and Robin Soderling, insists that tennis is a mental game.

“We spend more time talking, I guess, than on the court,” he said. “I’m not here to teach him how to hit forehands or backhands. He’s so good at that. It’s more to get everything together, to believe that he can use his strength in the right moment, that he picks up the right shot at the right moment, always finds the balance in his nerves.

“The best players handle the tension better than the lower-ranked players. It’s all about the mind. We worked a lot on that, talking, talking.”

Team Edmund drew up a specific plan of action going into the new season. Two of the first areas they worked on were the serve and return. Some technical changes have helped Edmund to improve his serve and Rosengren is pleased with their progress on the returns after he identified a weakness last year.

“It was so easy to hit an ace on him wide on the forehand,” Rosengren said. “He was giving away forehands when I was watching him in China for three weeks. It was definitely something he had to work on.

“You have to learn to block the return, you have to learn to start playing, depending on the scoreboard: take risks if it is 30-0, or the first point of the game, depending how you’re playing, but you have to be able to put the ball in the court if the pressure is coming from the other side of the net.

“This is what I tried to teach Kyle, to understand the game, to know what to do whether he’s under pressure or whether his opponent is. I’ve told him to keep his eyes open: if you see your opponent cramping, or if you maybe see him looking nervous, you have to look across to the other side of the net, not just look down. You can’t just be thinking about your own game.”

One of the many things that have pleased Rosengren here has been the way that Edmund has handled different situations. In two of his next three matches after he beat Kevin Anderson in the first round, Rosengren said Edmund had been “pretty slow, very nervous, bad, not good to watch” as he struggled with the pressure of being the favourite, but the coach added: “Tennis is about finding a way to win. I always say if you start winning matches when you don’t play your best, you start becoming a good player.”

Edmund has been in the form of his life in Melbourne (Reuters)

Rosengren said Edmund had been “unbelievable” in the way he had handled the very different circumstances in his quarter-final victory over Grigor Dimitrov as the Briton made his debut in Rod Laver Arena against one of the tournament favourites.

“I told him to go in there with his eyes open, his chest out and try to enjoy it,” Rosengren said. “I was so happy when I saw him walk on court.”

What delights Rosengren as much as anything is the fact that Edmund is a good listener. “Yesterday, everything we talked about before the match, he did from the first point. I am the happiest guy because I am thinking about the future, not only this match. So my book when I am sitting there is only for the future, not for this match.”

Rosengren wants Edmund to go into the semi-final believing that he can win. “He played Cilic in Shanghai last year and he didn’t play well, so I think he will go in there with pretty good confidence,” Rosengren said. “We will find some things to really focus on, but he has to bring his level. At this stage of the tournament, you’re not winning matches when you play badly.”

Is Edmund keeping Rosengren young? “No, I’m getting 10 years older every match,” Rosengren smiled. “Look at this grey hair. This job can’t make me younger. I always love what I’m doing, but I think every day, when I am sitting there: ‘Why am I doing this’?”

Rosengren can be a jack-in-the-box as he watches from the sidelines, but said it was because he cared. “I promise you that I’ll quit the day I don’t care any more,” he said.