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And then what never happened happened.
Novak Djokovic lost in the Australian Open semifinals on Friday to Jannik Sinner, the first time he has lost a semifinal or final in the tournament he has won a record 10 times: a perfect 20-0 in the tournament’s biggest matches. .
Sinner, the 22-year-old rising Italian who beat Djokovic twice late last year, crushed his strangely out-of-sync opponent early, before avoiding one of his trademark attacks, and beat the 24-time Grand Slam champion by six. -1, 6-2, 6-7(6), 6-3.
Djokovic could have gone easy, but he didn’t, avoiding the finish with a backhand and a magical topspin lob and saving match point by pressuring Sinner to hit a forehand into the net. When he cut the deficit in half two points later, closing within a set, he turned to the crowd with a smile and a raised fist as he strutted to the side of the court, as cheers of “Novak, Novak” rained down on him. . Anyone who has watched Djokovic escape so many near-death experiences, especially in Australia, would have been a fool if he hadn’t thought another wild comeback might be in the offing.
Not on this day. Not against Sinner, who not only didn’t let Djokovic break his serve even once, he didn’t even give him a single chance. Sinner also broke Djokovic’s serve five times, the decisive one at the start of the fourth set, in a match as strange as Djokovic’s afternoon. Sinner rose from 0-for-40, then accepted the rare good fortune of a double fault and a long forehand to take a 3-1 lead. And then all he had to do was the same thing he had been doing all day, and he did it.
With one last perfect forehand down the line, Sinner had sealed it and Djokovic was trotting towards the net in defeat. Within seconds, he had his suitcases on his shoulders, his hands in the air and two thumbs up to the crowd that treats him like one of their own.
“I tried to keep pushing,” Sinner said. “Last year I lost to him in the Wimbledon semi-finals. I learned a lot from that.”
Roger Federer is retired. Rafael Nadal has almost arrived. Djokovic’s latest challenge is to hold off the next generation, led by Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, as much as he can. It’s becoming the ultimate intergenerational show, packed with nerves, twists and subplots at every turn.
Sinner shot out of the starting gate like the junior ski champion he was. He did almost everything right in the first set, helped enormously by Djokovic, who did almost everything wrong.
“In a way, I was surprised by my level, you know, in a bad way,” a dejected Djokovic said after the match. “I didn’t do much good in the first two sets. I guess this is one of the worst Grand Slam matches I’ve ever played. At least that’s what I remember.
He pushed Djokovic deep behind the baseline, then sent him running, chasing balls that bounced and jumped outside the boundary lines, and then fired into the open field at those points where Djokovic could reach the ball and retrieve it. .
He landed a solid 65 percent of his first serves and won 80 percent of those points, depriving Djokovic of even the opportunity to do much damage. He chose the right moments to attack, winning the point each time he went up to the net.
However, it takes two to play tennis, and Sinner’s power got a lot of boost thanks to Djokovic’s inability to do even the normal Djokovic things early on: extend points until his opponent’s game falls apart, use his serve to pin Sinner at the back of the court or even hit his first serve with any level of consistency. His backhand, perhaps the most reliable and dangerous of all tennis backhands, came wide or long and sometimes both, over and over again.
When the first set ended, the kind of set Djokovic almost never plays, his stat sheet told an unpleasant story: He hit only 43 percent of his first serves and won only 15 of the 43 points he and Sinner played.
The second set was more of the same, with some slight improvements but almost the same results. An early break of Sinner’s serve and a late one. Djokovic chasing and reaching balls and sending them to the center of the net. Attempts to move forward that ended with his head turning, watching another passing shot go by. Fourteen unforced errors, surpassed in points 28-17.
Again, it takes two in tennis, and it’s never entirely clear to what extent one player’s stellar play is causing the other’s shit. On Friday afternoon, on the court, Djokovic has largely dominated and has never lost a semi-final or final, where no one has beaten him in five years, the answer, as always, was twofold.
Since Sinner came on the tour and reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam for the first time at the French Open in 2020, there has been one word that smart people in tennis use to describe Sinner: solid. In many ways, he is the ultimate compliment, what peers say about someone who always shows up and almost never defeats himself.
“I just tried to play as relaxed as possible but also keep the right game plan in mind,” Sinner said. “I think it worked very well today.”
Sinner was as solid as ever, barely giving Djokovic any room to land the first blow to the jaw and smother him as he has done so many times, to so many others, after a slow start. Djokovic knows better than anyone who has ever played the game how to step on an opponent’s neck. But first he has to take them down and he never did.
There’s another word you hear in locker rooms and on practice fields when players and their coaches talk about Sinner. He describes the feel of his ball when he hits his racket: it is “heavy.”
Combine a heavy ball with someone who barely makes mistakes, especially on his own serve, and playing with a pair of 22-year-old legs that now move as well as anyone’s, and you’ll need just about the best player on the field. planet and there are very few players on the planet who are not in for a difficult afternoon. Sometimes you are flat, slow and error-prone because your opponent makes you that way, even when you are Novak Djokovic.
Through it all, Djokovic maintained a mostly blank expression. He barely looked at his coach, Goran Ivanisevic, for suggestions. He didn’t yell at his box for not giving him more support. He didn’t break a single racket on the net post. He didn’t fall out with any of Sinner’s fans, who had no qualms about shouting their support for his boy, often in Italian, one of the many languages Djokovic speaks fluently.
More often than not, those are things Djokovic does against lesser opponents when he can save energy while chasing a spark. Against Sinner on Friday, anyone could see from the first ball that he was going to need every ounce of energy in his reserves. And something else.
“Throughout the whole tournament, I haven’t really played anywhere near my best,” Djokovic said. “I didn’t really feel like myself on the court during this tournament. You can say the semi-finals are a great result, of course, but I always expect the best from myself and it wasn’t meant to be today.”
Whatever he had, whatever he did, it wasn’t enough. It was the first time that he did not reach the final of a Grand Slam that he played in since the 2022 French Open. By late afternoon at Melbourne Park, Djokovic’s record in Australian Open semi-finals and finals fell to 20-1.
(Photo: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)