Sharada Iyer, Tennis With An Accent
In the last few years, it’s not often that Novak Djokovic has been made to look like the second-best player in a match, especially not in a best-of-five battle. At the 2024 Australian Open, however, there were two such instances in which the Serbian looked like he wasn’t playing at his optimal level. The first time was in his first-round match against 18-year-old Croatian qualifier, Dino Prizmic. He still managed to find a way through against the teenager and made the tournament semifinals. There, he encountered the other guy who made him look like a distant runner: Jannik Sinner. Try as he might, Djokovic failed to pose the tactics needed to get to a comfortable place at any point in the match.
Against Jannik Sinner on Friday, Djokovic was thoroughly bested. He seemed out of ideas and for the first time, in a long time – if ever – he was made to feel his age. Whatever shot he came up with, Sinner had an answer for it. The uncertainty of being made to second-guess himself also debilitated Djokovic in that he coughed up more errors. It created such a vicious downward spiral that Djokovic never recovered. Moreover, although he did take the third set – thus becoming the first player in the entirety of the tournament to win a set against the Italian – he never looked like he would build momentum for himself in the proceedings.
The stats reflected as much.
In the first five matches combined in Melbourne, Djokovic’s tally of double faults was nine. The most double faults he had hit in a match was in his third-round clash against Tomas Etcheverry, with five. In his semifinal against Sinner, Djokovic served four double faults while his opponent had just one, when serving for the match at 5-3 in the fourth set.
Also look at the number of aces Djokovic hit in this tournament. Against Sinner, Djokovic had just seven aces. The lowest he’d hit before this was 11, in each of his opening two rounds against Prizmic and Alexei Popyrin.
As for winners and unforced errors, Djokovic hit 32 winners – one more than Sinner’s 31. However, he finished the match with 54 unforced errors, almost twice as many as Sinner’s 28.
One could posit that Djokovic’s (relatively) humongous error count was a result of trying to go for broke against Sinner’s consistency and quiet confidence. To the contrary, Djokovic’s error count had been building from his first service game. Sinner’s shot selection drew errors from Djokovic’s racquet, making him concede a break right away.
What made the match even more dire for the 10-time Australian Open titlist is that not only did he fail to create break points for himself, but also that across the first, second and third sets, it was Sinner who took a lead against him. The only time the defending champ at Melbourne Park led Sinner was in the third set, albeit on serve.
After the match, in his press conference, it didn’t take much for Djokovic to admit the flaws of his game against Sinner.
“He’s deservedly in the finals. He outplayed me completely today. Look, I was, in a way, shocked with my level, you know, in a bad way. There was not much I was doing right in the first two sets. I guess this is one of the worst Grand Slam matches I’ve ever played, at least that I remember. Not a very pleasant feeling playing this way,” were his clinically observant words.
As observant as these words were, it wouldn’t take much to observe that most likely he would want to go back to the proverbial drawing board to fix the problems from his latest match. It would also be par for the course for him, the player who defied the odds to become the one to beat on this planet — anywhere, anytime, and across generations.
Toward the end of the 2023 season and at the start of the 2024 season, Djokovic reiterated his commitment to keep adding titles and keep going for more for as long as he can. At the start of the 2024 Australian Open, on paper, Djokovic was the strongest – and fittest – of them all. That Jannik Sinner ended up waylaying these expectations and predictions has enabled this head-to-head matchup to take on a more complicated shape.
Only time and Djokovic can now say how the course of this rivalry will flow in the months to come. Over to you, Novak Djokovic.
Tennis with an Accent 