SIMON BRIGGS
If this French Open has taught me anything, it is that the tennis world is in denial about the scale of its Novak Djokovic problem.
People actually thought he was going to lose! To Carlos Alcaraz! A guy who went on a hot streak at the US Open (when Djokovic was absent on visa grounds) but had never gone beyond the quarter-finals at Roland Garros!
And it wasn’t only the punters and bookmakers. There were dozens of analysts, coaches and former legends arguing that Alcaraz would cruise through Friday’s semi-final on the back of his creativity and exuberance. They expressed their views with such
unanimity that I began to wonder what I was missing.
But then I went back to the most frightening page on the internet. The one you see when you call up the Tennis Abstract website and ask for the list of Djokovic’s defeats at majors.
The message was clear. Barring illness, accident or Rafael Nadal, Djokovic is untouchable.
To expand slightly, his CV shows four losses at the slams since he resolved the elbow issue that dogged him from around 2017 to 2019.
Two of them were inflicted by Nadal at Roland Garros: the only combination of circumstances that the mature Djokovic has ever struggled to overcome.
Another arrived like the proverbial bolt from the blue when he whacked a ball into a line woman’s throat.
And the last was a rare, possibly unique case of the real Djokovic failing to show up for a significant match. That was the 2021 US Open final, where stress and exhaustion left him sobbing into his towel against Daniil Medvedev.
Does it matter if Djokovic is good enough to win major titles while wearing a blindfold and swinging a frying pan? Well, it does matter a bit. He’s played two slams this year and dropped a grand total of three sets. Which doesn’t make for riveting
drama.
The first of those blemishes came against Enzo Couacaud (yeah, I hadn’t heard of him either) in Melbourne; the second against Karen Khachanov in Paris. They were entertaining matches, on a superficial level, but no one doubted that Djokovic would pull
away in the end.
The only real unpredictability of his entire grand-slam season came on Friday afternoon, in the early stages of that hugely anticipated semi-final against Alcaraz. The stadium was agog for two hours. The air sizzled, both with heat and with excitement.
And then, disaster. Just as the contest seemed to be approaching a crescendo, Alcaraz was rendered immobile by a cramping calf. Personally, I don’t think he would have won anyway. The only way he was staying on terms with Djokovic was by performing
minor miracles, point after exhausting point.
Alcaraz was pushed to the limit to stay in contention ... and then he snapped CREDIT: Reuters/Clodagh Kilcoyne
Let’s look at that list of players who have beaten Djokovic again. Move a little further back, towards those wilderness years when he was nursing his elbow and changing his coaches, and you’ll find the likes of Stan Wawrinka, Dominic Thiem and Tomas
Berdych – all players who have either now retired or been reduced to a shadow of their former selves.
With Nadal rehabbing his hip and skipping the rest of the season, there isn’t a single person out there with the knowledge and physical capacity to take Djokovic down over the best of five sets.
And how do you learn? Djokovic developed his mastery through repeated exposure to the ultimate finishing school. He kept coming up against Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray, tournament after tournament, throughout the Big Four’s halcyon years in the
late 2000s and early 2010s.
Alcaraz can beat up on his contemporaries all he likes, but playing Djokovic is different, and he admitted as much after Friday’s semi-final. “I have never felt that tension that I did in that match,” Alcaraz confessed. “If someone says that he
gets to the court with no nerves playing against Novak, he lies. Next time that I’m gonna face Novak, I hope to be different, but the nerves will be there.”
How can Alcaraz bridge the knowledge gap? Perhaps he and his coach – former world No1 Juan Carlos Ferrero – will be able to distil enough information from those two hours on Court Philippe Chatrier. But experience is precious, and one suspects they
will need a couple more goes before they are truly ready.
By which time, Djokovic will have completed the calendar slam and started wondering whether he can get to 30 majors. In all probability, he will play with even greater freedom and fluency now that he has landed No23 and no longer needs to worry about the
scrap for the top of the leaderboard.
Unless Alcaraz matures faster than I am expecting, the only things that can stop Djokovic are a loss of motivation or an injury to his apparently ageless body.
So if you want an image of tennis’s future, imagine Djokovic’s Asics trainers bounding to and fro on every kind of surface, for many months to come.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2023/06/13/tennis-needs-novak-djokovic-find-new-sparring-partner/
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