MELBOURNE—The final Grounds Pass of this year’s Aussie Open is being written on what feels like, through the early hours at least, the hottest day of the last two weeks. There’s a chance of rain tonight as well, which could mean our first roof-closing.
I had a preview of where I’m heading in a couple of days at my local café this morning. From a table across the room I began to hear something I hadn’t heard for a while, something I’d forgotten, something out of the distant past: Adults using the word “like” in the middle of sentences. “It was just, like, so ridiculous what happened to her.” Americans! Am I ready to go back?
Predictions are Like . . . Something Or Other: Everybody’s Got One All that’s left for the papers are the prognostications. Most prominent is Rod Laver’s in the Herald–Sun. He surprises me by taking Rafael Nadal over Novak Djokovic. After reading him, I’m still not exactly sure what his reasons are.
“Assuming both players are close to 100 percent as they can be,” the Rocket writes, “I think Nadal is playing a little better. Having said that, the only advantage I give to Nadal is that he is fresher, or should be.”
See, Rocket, the prediction game, trickier than it looks, isn't it?
I’m surprised to see Laver go against recent history. I’m equally surprised that four of the six Herald-Sun sportswriters who were polled also went with Nadal. I think at this point you have to take Djokovic over Rafa until proven otherwise. As one of the two HS writers to pick the Djoker, Jon Ralph, puts it, “He just finds a way to beat the left-hander.”
As for those who make their livings doing this kind of thing, they’re going with Nole: $1.65 to $2.30 for Nadal. According to the money, Djokovic in four is the most likely outcome. A little surprising to me is that Djokovic winning a fifth set is deemed more likely than Nadal winning a fifth. If it goes the distance, I think I would take Rafa.
Nadal himself seemed to have taken a lesson from Novak's last five-set victim, Andy Murray. Rafa said yesterday, in his Rafa way, that Djokovic's ability to go from exhausted to awesome in two hours time was "funny, no?" and that it was, "difficult to imagine he has these problems." He also gave Murray the best piece of advice I've heard: Essentially, you can't play a fourth set like he did against Nole and expect to win a Grand Slam.
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With a Whimper Rather Than a Shriek Elsewhere in the Herald-Sun, Jon Ralph remarks on the serially disappointing nature of the women’s finals here. “Might as well come out with it,” he writes, “the Australian Open women’s final is becoming one of the great anti-climaxes in sport.”
“Four times in the past seven years a finalist has won three games or fewer—Dinara Safina in 2009, Justine Henin in 2006, and Sharapova in 2007.”
According to Ralph, fans who bought their pricey tickets, “got an 88-minute procession where the loudest cheers were for hecklers from the crowd and video referral decisions.”
Also noticeable were empty rows of those pricey seats around the top of the arena.
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He’s Up, He’s Down, He’s Up, He’s . . . Today it's Age columnist Tim Lane’s turn to decide which direction the world No. 3 is heading. Lane takes the mythic route: “Roger Federer, certainly, has become a Job-like figure—endowed with great gifts, admired and praised but later teased and wounded by the Gods.”
I guess that's one way of looking at this stage of Federer’s career. In his prime, he was untouchable; everything he did turned to gold, or at least a Grand Slam win. Now, at 30, when he needs a break, he can’t catch one.
Lane is surprised that someone of Federer’s stature seems determined to keep at it well past 30, but eventually concludes: “Who are we to argue?” He cites three recent greats who “defied calls to give it away when things got tough” and “ultimately came out ahead.” Two are cricketers, Tendulkar and Ponting, and one is another tennis player, Andre Agassi.
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The Sport of Wrath? Tennis and myth is the subject of another Age column, by Michael Coulter. He writes about the phenomenon of the tennis tantrum, and how the equivalent of normal aggressive behavior in team sports is blown up to gigantic proportions in tennis.
“Unlike, say, football, everything that is said or done on the court is captured by the cameras,” Coulter writes. “There are no whispered sledges or sneak kidney punches at the bottom of the pack. There is no outlet for anger in tennis except for a good hard tirade.”
Coulter goes on to invoke Dante and the concept of wrath. This is the sin of false righteousness—overreation, essentially—and one that tennis players routinely commit against officials, in part because they have nowhere else to direct their anger.
In the end, for these reasons, Coulter thinks there’s no stopping the tantrum, and there’s no stopping our guilty pleasure in watching them, over and over:
“The great Marcos Baghdatis Racquet Massacre of 2012 has been shown roughly every 15 minutes for the past two weeks, while Channel 7 concocted a mini-documentary out of Snub-gate, when dastardly Czech Tomas Berdych refused to shake the hand of his opponent.”
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Odd, and End
—What’s the secret to getting to the top of the men’s game? Never, ever, follow your serve to the net. As the Herald-Sun notes, “Djokovic has won 664 points for the tournament, with just two of them from serve-volleying. Nadal has won 681 points for the tournament, with only four of them from serve-volleying.” I’m not sure if that counts points returning serve, which would obviously make serve-and-volley impossible. Either way, these guys hang around the baseline a lot. Djokovic even apologized to Rod Laver himself for it after his match with Andy Murray.
—The juniors took over center court yesterday. First, 15-year-old Taylor Townsend of the U.S. won the girls, then Aussie Luke Saville, a loser in the final here last year, edged his Canadian opponent in the boys’ final.
Townsend teared up during her trophy speech. Saville . . . went in another direction. After thanking the sponsors and the ball kids like a 20-year veteran, the deep-voiced Saville wound up to this rousing finish: “It feels a s***load better than last year!”
Upon hearing those moving words, the trophy presenter hurried back to the mike and said, quietly, “Um, well done, Luke.”
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I doubt Rafa or Nole will be able to—or have any desire to—match Saville’s speech-making skills tonight, but enjoy the men’s final anyway, wherever you are and whatever time it may be. I'll leave you with a clip of what might be the closest historical parallel to the match we're about to see. At the Aussie Open in 1975, Jimmy Connors was coming off a three-Slam season, while John Newcombe was a former No. 1 on the slight decline. He hadn't gotten a chance to play Jimbo at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open the year before, but he had his revenge in this one. The venue, the surface, the clothes, the style of the play, and the players' demeanors are miles apart from what we see now, but the situation is similar.
You can watch the conclusion of that match here; unfortunately, that video can't be embedded. So here's a clip of one fairly amazing rally from it. (I"m not sure what Jimbo is doing at the start, but if you weren't a fan of his "antics," you might want to avert your eyes for the first five seconds.)
MELBOURNE—“Just a few points here or there.” We know the phrase well; that’s all there is, sometimes, between winning and losing. But rarely has a big-time tennis match turned so quickly and decisively on a point or two as Victoria Azarenka’s 6-3, 6-0 win in the Australian Open final over Maria Sharapova did tonight.
I don’t mean to say that that was all that separated them; this was an even bigger blowout than the last two major women’s finals, at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and that’s saying something. What I mean is that it only took a loose error or two from Sharapova, in the third game, to spin the match 180 degrees and transform an extremely nervy Azarenka into an extremely imposing one—as well as the new, Slam-full No. 1 player in the world.
Azarenka was making her Grand Slam final debut, and she came out looking like a rookie. Sharapova won the coin toss and let her serve first; it looked like a canny move when Azarenka double-faulted at 30-all and was broken. When Sharapova tore through her in the second game, and Azarenka stopped running and let a winner go past her at game point, nightmare visions of other debut Slam finalists—Dinara Safina, for Aussie fans—began to dance in our heads. After 10 points, Azarenka had made six unforced errors. After double faulting for 0-30 in the third game, she looked certain to go down two breaks.
Sharapova made an error. Azarenka hit a good serve. Sharapova made another error. Then Azarenka, with her first really confident swing of the night, took a high forehand and threaded it up the line for a winner, and her first hold. She fist-pumped and practically leaped to the sidelines. You could see even then, without knowing what would eventually happen—i.e., that she would lose just one more game—that Vika had shaken loose.
“I was super nervous,” admitted Azarenka, who said she had been ready to get out there hours earlier. “The first games were kind of a disaster.”
Then this self-described ex-head case went back to the mantra that has served her so well recently: “I just got back in the moment."
Of course, even if it hadn’t happened then, it was probably going to happen for Azarenka eventually. It was her night, her tournament, and her year so far.
“She did everything better than I did today,” a subdued Sharapova said afterward. “She was the one who was taking the first ball and hitting it deep. I was always the one running around like a rabbit.”
Asked whether she had noticed Azarenka’s nerves at the start, Sharapova said that sooner or later, her opponent was going to get rolling. “I had a lot of matches in my career where I had terrible starts,” she said. “Sometimes those just don’t really matter until you see what happens in the end. From my side, I think the switch went off.”
Azarenka went from finding her feet to soaring above her opponent a few games later. She did, as Sharapova said, everything well—tactically, technically, emotionally, and with variety. At 3-3, 30-30, she surprised Sharapova with a strong serve into her body; then she lofted a soft topspin lob winner to hold. In the next game, in some of the last points of the evening that could be termed crucial, Azarenka was even better.
Sharapova served at 3-4 and the game see-sawed to a third deuce. On that point, Azarenka took a second serve, drilled it deep and up the middle—a sure-fire play for her the whole tournament—and knocked off a swing volley. On break point, she again dictated from the baseline, but this time she went the finesse route and ended it by cutting under a backhand drop shot at the last second. Sharapova had no chance.
She wouldn’t have another. If the first set was about Azarenka rising to the moment, the second was about Sharapova trying to join her there, and failing. She tried to wrest control of the rallies, and often she worked herself into a winning position. But there was an error waiting around every corner.
“There was no way I was going to win the match if I was going to let her dictate,” Sharapova said. "But yeah, I think maybe I overdid it.”
In what seemed like no time at all—the seagulls had barely had time to gather to see their fellow shriekers—it was 5-0 and the 22-year-old Azarenka was stepping to the line to serve for her first Grand Slam. There was one more hiccup, an errant service toss that betrayed a hint of nerves, but otherwise she closed it out like she’d been doing it all her life. At deuce, Sharapova cracked a low, deep return at Azarenka’s formerly more erratic stroke, her forehand. There was nothing erratic about this response: Vika bent down like a hockey goalie and reflexed the ball down the line. She left Sharapova running like a rabbit one more time.
It had to be a disappointing loss for the 24-year-old Maria, who has slaved to find her old form and reach the Top 5 again. In the last year, she’s threatened at three separate majors but come up just short at all of them. What must be particularly galling is that she’s lost two to Slam-final neophytes—her experience has, essentially, counted for nothing. At the same time, there can’t be any second thoughts or regrets about this one. Sharapova was, as she said, thoroughly beaten. So thoroughly that she appeared shell-shocked in the moments after match point.
Sharapova walked off after the handshake and sat down on her sideline bench. She composed herself there, and didn’t move. The house lights began to dim as Azarenka bounced around, talking to whoever was in sight. Sharapova remained immobile, staring straight ahead. When the lights had gone down all the way, all you could see from across the arena was her bright green visor, still on her head. It didn’t move an inch.
Afterward, Azarenka, more effusive with the press than normal, credited her coach of two years, Sam Sumyk, for his patient work with her.
“Sam, I feel like he was not pushing me,” she said, “but guiding me toward that winning attitude. He helped me to find my way, not pushing his way. It’s important to have that education, that you have to learn to do it yourself, because in the end of the day you’re the one who’s holding the racquet.”
This win, over this opponent, brings Azarenka full circle. The rise that culminated with her first major title, and her ascendancy to No. 1, began last April with another pummeling of Sharapova, in the final in Key Biscayne. She built on that win, with a trip to the Wimbledon semifinals, with a valiant performance in defeat against Serena Williams at the U.S. Open, with a hard-fought loss to Petra Kvitova in the final of the WTA Tour championships. The whole time she seemed to be growing—calmer, more confident, sharper in her technique and tactics. She was the one holding the racquet out there, and this formerly volatile young player was taking responsibility for that fact. She wasn't, for one thing, breaking them anymore.
Azarenka was still learning in Melbourne. Last week, she said she had to make herself angry again to finish a match: she had gotten too calm out there. I speculated at the time that maintaining the balance between anger and ease on court would be precarious. Today, it sounded like she did just that.
When she was asked after the match what she had been feeling, Azarenka expressed what for her is a winning state of mind.
“I looked like I was in the zone,” she said. “But I was boiling inside.”
MELBOURNE—A lot of cool things happened to 15-year-old Taylor Townsend on her trip to Australia this month. She got a few toy kangaroo souvenirs for her family, as well as a couple of koala trophies. She watched Roger and Rafa go toe to toe—“I was in shock,” Townsend said of their rallies. She played inside Rod Laver Arena, made a Hawk-Eye challenge, and, for good measure, completed a rare sweep of the girls’ singles and doubles events. But all of that may have paled in comparison with her biggest find at Melbourne Park: four official Australian Open towels, sitting in the sun, unattended.
You must realize that these aren’t any old towels. The pros take them by the thousands each year. Rafael Nadal said today that he has 10 of them himself. So you can understand Townsend’s excitement when she stumbled upon her treasure. “I was surprised I saw four towels,” she said, flashing her braces in a wide grin. “Like two towels on one seat, two towels on the other. I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m gonna snag these.
“That’s exactly what I did.”
It’s been a banner Aussie Open for Townsend in many ways. Seeded 14th and competing in just her second junior Grand Slam, she became the youngest winner of a junior singles title here since her friend Donald Young did it at the same age six years ago. The two prodigies share more than just that piece of trivia. Both are left-handed, both are African-American, both hail from Chicago, and both have trained with Young’s parents, Donald, Sr., and Alona, in Atlanta. That’s where Townsend says she learned the attacking game and accomplished net play that may set her apart from her peers in the future. “Ever since I was young,” the apparently not-that-young-anymore Townsend says, “when I started playing tennis, we always did volleys. Mr. Young and Ms. Young, they always taught me just to move forward.”
Townsend says with a matter of fact smile that she has “pretty good hands.” Those hands were in evidence in her three-set win over Yulia Putintseva of Russia in today's girls’ final, a histrionical affair that ended with the loser smashing her racquet over and over and the winner falling to a scorched rubberized court before overflowing with that she called “tears of joy.” Townsend, who switched last year to the Prince EXO3 Tour and began using the company's Beast XP brand of spin-producing polyester strings, won the match with powerful forehands and two-handed backhands, some well-timed, precociously savvy net play, and a heavy, cutting lefty serve. Its motion, perhaps not surprisingly, bears more than a passing resemblance to Young’s.
“She has a great feel for the game,” says USTA director of player development Patrick McEnroe. Townsend left Atlanta last year to train at the USTA’s center in Boca Raton, Fla. “She has that easy power you love to see, and more variety than most of the girls. I think it’s a game that should translate well at the pro level.”
McEnroe also likes the fact that she’s working with what he calls a “tight-knit group of girls at Boca.” It includes 17-year-old Grace Min, last year’s U.S. Open junior champion, and 16-year-old Madison Keys. “I think it’s when you get those groups together that you see success at the higher level.” For U.S. tennis fans waiting for their next women’s champion, these are signs for cautious optimism.
“We practice together,” Townsend says of her days at Boca with Keys and Min. “We push each other.”
What’s next for Townsend? She seems ready for more, right away. A reporter asked her today if she was ready to “slow yourself down and not push success too fast?”
The outgoing Townsend didn’t hesitate with her answer. “No,” she said, “I mean, I’m just gonna keep doing what we’ve been doing. I’m playing a pro tournament in about a week. It’s a great opportunity, It’s a 100,000 [dollar tournament, in Midland, Texas], so I’m just gonna go there and do my thing.”
The fun stuff, the koalas and the kangaroos, is over fast, and the pro grind beckons. “You want a balance,” McEnroe says of how Townsend should proceed from here. “A mix of competition—play the big junior events and ease into women’s events, try to get into the Top 100 this year. The big thing is that she keeps playing her game."
Townsend is currently ranked No. 426, so there’s not shortage of work to be done in 2012. After this Aussie Open, though, when she’s back sweating with her friends on the hot courts in Boca, she’ll know what she’s playing for and what a big title feels like. And she’ll have a few nice towels to keep herself dry.
MELBOURNE—Talk about an epic. Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray started their match around 7:45 P.M. Friday night; I filed my post on it this morning at 4:25 A.M. I wondered if I was just a slow writer, until I saw a Tweet from the Herald-Tribune’s Chris Clarey. He was finishing up himself and preparing to meet the dawn as he walked back to his hotel. This may or may not be the Happy Slam, but it’s definitely a no sleep Slam.
It shouldn’t go as late on Saturday, when the women play their final, though you never know in a tournament without final-set tiebreakers. Who do you think will win? It’s a good match-up, storywise—young player coming into her own vs. a former champ who has labored hard to find her old form. I’m going to take Azarenka, even though it’s her Slam-final debut. She’s held impressively steady so far.
Before I get to the tennis sections of the local papers, there were two other sports stories in today's weekend Australian that, for whatever reason, I found moving. One was about the Indian cricket batsman Sachin Tendulkar, a legendary figure from what I can tell, who failed to get his 100th 100 in a test match against Australia yesterday. There’s a photo of a joyous Aussie team celebrating around the wounded figure of Tendulkar, with this quote from Australian bowler Nathan Lyon below: “It’s been a privilege to get him out.”
On the next page, The Australian brings us a column all the way from the London Times, by our old friend Simon Barnes. The Great Ponytail laments the words of British government official Jeremy Hunt, who recently referred to this summer’s Olympic Games as a “great business opportunity.” This sets the sentimental Barnes off to find 50 reasons, mostly sporting moments from the last 50 years, why his country still has a soul and can’t be reduced to a brand. What sounds like a baby boom nostalgia trip—No. 46 is, “The Beatles: still the best, forever the best”—ends up being, as I said, moving in its sincerity and peculiarity. Barnes’ No. 4 British sporting moment is, “Virginia Wade winning the women’s singles at Wimbledon in Silver Jubilee year (1977) to a soundtrack by the Sex Pistols: a glorious British contradiction.” Sports as part of the texture of life—well done.
How About "No. 1-less Slammers"? Elsewhere in The Australian, Patrick Smith mounts an intriguing, counterintuitive defense for Caroline Wozniacki. He wonders why we need the No. 1 player to have won a Slam, when we don’t automatically make each Slam winner the No. 1 player in the world for that week. It’s apples and oranges, to Smith. To have any meaning, the ranking can’t just be the measure of any one, or even four, tournaments, but performance over a significant period of time.
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About that Decline . . . From the Fickle Media department: On Thursday he was on the way back up; Friday he was all but out of the game; now, on Saturday, Roger Federer has “more Slams in his sights.”
Or, at the Age puts it, “Unperturbed by Rafael Nadal’s apparent mental hold over him, a defiant Federer has vowed to return for many more cracks at the Australian Open.”
The paper quotes Federer’s line about Nadal playing “a bit better against me than against other players.”
Nadal was informed of Federer’s assessment in his own press conference. He agreed that he has “played some good matches” against his rival, but what was important was that he was “ready to play” those particular matches.
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Locker Room Talk The Bryan Brothers, on the eve of potentially breaking the men’s doubles Grand Slam record, return to the Age with a behind the scenes column on some of the top singles guys.
Rafa: “His personality has really blossomed over the years,” the Bros write. “He used to be pretty shy, but now it kind of feels like he’s a leader on the tour. He’s a bit more relaxed and voicing his opinions. You don’t see any of that in the locker room, though. He’s probably the most intense guy in there. He usually has his headphones on; he’s got his routine down.”
Janko Tipsarevic: “He’s one of the good guys. He’s really smart, down to earth, and just a cool guy. He has a really good perspective.”
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Rafa Answers the Questions Nadal has been taking a couple of fan queries each day for the past two weeks in the Age. There must have been a backlog, though, because he goes all out with seven Q and A's today. Two of them are worth repeating
Miri asks: How many Australian Open towels do you have now? [The players reportedly steal something like 10,000 of them here each year]
Rafa: “I haven’t counted them, and I give them away to my team. But around 10? Don’t tell the tournament though."
Juliette asks: "Hi Rafa, do you have a favorite poem or poet? I remember when you read part of a famous poem at Wimbledon . . . "
Rafa: "They made me read that poem that you find at the entrance of Centre Court [Rudyard Kipling’s “If–“]. It was nice, although tough for me to understand the words.”
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Federer, Nadal . . . and Colaci? That’s Dylan Colaci, a 14-year-old who ball-boyed the Nadal-Federer semifinal here. He's the YouTube story of the millisecond, for the catch shown below. Colaci has been interviewed by all of the papers here, but to be honest, I'm not totally sure what the fuss is all about:
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Braveheart, At Last I half-expected Andy Murray, despite his fifth set comeback last night, to be raked over the coals in Brit tab-land anyway. This time, apparently, it was different. He wasn’t the loser or the choker or the too passive mama’s boy. The Daily Mail sums up the general reaction with this headline:
“DAZZLING IN DEFEAT, MURRAY HITS NEW HEIGHTS AS HE LOSES CLASSIC DUEL WITH DJOKOVIC Even in the hour of a shattering defeat, his body broken by nearly five hours of relentless combat, Andy Murray could console himself with one thought: He is finally looking and acting like a Grand Slam champion in waiting.”
I wouldn’t go that far, even though the evening was a step forward for him. But it’s nice to see respect for hard work.
Just don’t make it a habit, tabloids. This column wouldn’t be the same if you started keeping things in perspective.
MELBOURNE—For a good three hours, the semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray here was, to put it bluntly, a mess. Both players were fighting themselves as much as the guy across the net. Djokovic was battling his body, his nose, his allergies, his nerves. He was trying, with intermittent success, to settle down and let the athleticism flow like it had last year. It took him until the fourth set to shed all of his burdens and start looking like the best player in the world again.
As for Murray, he was fighting against his instincts toward safety and counter-punching, while trying his best to implement the more aggressive game plan that new coach Ivan Lendl wanted him to use. It made for a match that neither guy seemed prepared to step up and grab. After one point near the end of the fourth set, Djokovic walked away staggering in pain, while on the other side of the net, Murray was virtually on his knees screaming in anger. Lendl, perhaps channeling Mr. T's Clubber Lang character from Rocky III, gave Murray this pre-match nugget of wisdom: “It’s going to be painful,” he told his player. I guess the guy really does know what he's talking about.
One stat sums up the evening: There were 18 breaks of serve on 50 total break points. This was not an orderly contest. Still, Murray-Djokovic finally did cohere, and its fifth set offered a completely unforeseen turnaround that threatened to turn the match into a classic. The two wounded warriors—Djokovic said that “both of them went through a physical crisis” during the match—came together in the end to make the long, strange night worthwhile.
Let me start with Murray, who lost the match, 6-3, 3-6, 6-7 (4), 6-1, 7-5. We can debate how he approached the match tactically—47 winners and 86 unforced errors at least show that he went down swinging this time—but two particular moments are worth focusing on. One is an example of his characteristic flaw, while the other offers hope for change someday.
The first, and worst, of them came after Murray grabbed the lead for the first time. He ripped his way through the third-set tiebreaker—an ace at 3-3 and a roaring forehand winner three points later put a stamp on it. Now he was up two sets to one; how would he handle having nothing but the finish line in front of him? We didn't have to wait long for the answer. Serving in the first game of the fourth set, Murray suffered a quintessential brain cramp. Rather than finishing a sitter off with an overhead, he hesitated and plunked a swing volley over the baseline. A couple of wild unforced errors later and he was broken. A couple of games after that, he was tanking. Murray may have learned this maneuver from Lendl, who was famous for throwing sets and even matches early in his career. But he hasn’t mastered it yet. One thing you don’t want to do when you tank is let yourself be broken in the last game of the set. But Murray kept letting the balls go by even then, and Djokovic got to start the fifth serving. It proved to be pivotal.
“I guess maybe it was normal there was a letdown in the fourth set,” said Murray, who was thoughtful and positive in his press conference after what had to be a devastating defeat. “That was something I would have liked to have done better, though. I would like to have to played a better fourth set, get off to a better start.”
Murray was tired, but he was also a different player once he had the lead, a less intense and purposeful player—he didn’t know what to do with it.
The news wasn’t all bad for Andy. Something did change in the fifth set. He went down 2-5, then held. Until that point, he had had trouble recovering from his listlessness of the previous set. But as he set up to return serve, he began to fire himself up in a more genuine way than I’d seen from him. Murray was, for once, giving off sincere positive energy. Guess what happened? He played four brilliant points on Djokovic’s serve and won them all. Rod Laver Arena erupted. Hopefully Murray will remember that moment. He appeared, for one game—he hit four excellent returns and two blatant forehand winners—to have cracked the code to his potential.
As for Murray’s opponent, can we start calling Novak Djokovic the Benjamin Button of tennis? He starts matches as if he’s just finished playing five hard sets. He breathes deeply on the first changeover. He shuffles off court in the middle of the second set and sits down in an open-mouthed daze, as if he might not be able to answer the bell. Come the three-hour mark, though, the man suddenly has some spring in his step—he’s rounding into shape. After four hours, he’s sliding and grunting at full stretch, flipping up a perfect defensive lob, and then tearing toward the net to smack a forehand winner to break serve. He might as well be starting the match right then and there.
Djokovic’s old maladies have returned in Melbourne this week; he says he’s struggling with allergies. But there’s always been a mental component to these episodes as well. By the third-set tiebreaker tonight, Djokovic was laughing with his coach at his missed shots and joking around with the ball kids, with no signs of distress. It’s as if he has to work out his nerves, get to a point where he has nothing left to lose—such as being down two sets to one to Murray—and then he can let it rip, which is when he’s at his most dangerous.
Or, as Murray put it afterward, “He runs very, very well when he’s breathing heavily.” Murray said that it was something that he and Lendl “spoke about before the match.”
Djokovic ran very very well indeed in the fourth and fifth sets. He was back to his old defensive tricks, skidding across the baseline and breaking Murray at 3-2 with the defensive lob-forehand winner combination I mentioned above.
The match, after all that time, all of those rallies, all of the crises, came down to two consecutive shots. They were enough to describe the difference between these two players so far in their careers.
Murray followed up his break for 4-5 in the fifth with a strong hold. His momentum carried over to the next game, when he went up 15-40—two break points to serve for the final. Djokovic saved the first. On the second, the two players left exhaustion behind and fired 29 shots back and forth. Finally, pushed into a corner, Djokovic pulled the trigger and put a forehand on the line for a winner. It was this match’s version of the Shot. The shuffling, slicing, hurting Djokovic of three hours earlier was forgotten. The champ from 2011 had finally appeared.
Murray wasn’t finished. He earned another break point. The two began to rally, but rather than go big, as he had for much of the night, Murray stayed safe. Too safe: He sent a backhand lamely into the net. His chance had passed, and his decision to tank the last game of the fourth set came back to haunt him. Serving second, he was broken in the next game for the match.
Ten minutes later, a sweaty Murray was philosophical and even long-winded in the interview room. He said he was happy with his performance compared to his embarrassing loss to Djokovic in the final last year, and that he’s crossing his fingers he doesn’t suffer the same bottoming out, in confidence and motivation, that he has the last two springs. But Murray was honest enough to admit that he doesn’t know how he’s going to feel in a few days or weeks.
Meanwhile, No. 1 Djokovic moves on to meet No. 2 Rafael Nadal. Watching their wins these last two nights, it seemed that either match could have gone the other way. Djokovic could have missed that line-pasting forehand at break point. Nadal could have sent that desperation lob, hit when he was facing his own break in the final game against Federer, a few inches longer.
At the same time, though, this marks their third straight major final matchup, and one of them has appeared in the last seven Slam finals. It could have gone the other way for the world's two best players this time, but it was never likely.
