Novak Djokovic knew there was something about Jannik Sinner long before the Italian threatened to leave him out of Wimbledon on Tuesday afternoon. What he rediscovered about himself after returning from two sets to defeat Sinner in five sets in the first quarterfinals was that winning was never easy for him in the tournament he treasures above all others.
Seven times in his career, Djokovic has recovered from two sets to win. However, there has been a more shaky hand on his racquet under pressure at Wimbledon, where, 20 times now, he has lost the first set and has recovered to win only 11 times. In the language of baseball, he’s not always batting a thousand at the place where he’s won six titles and could win a seventh Sunday.
Last year, those hesitant starts in slam tournaments endangered him 10 times, the longest sequence of his career, and he managed to cross the line nine times, including twice at Wimbledon, where he first went recover against Jack Draper and then against Matteo Berrettini to win the title.
Five-set tennis is the ultimate test, but until they reach the final hurdles, the most ambitious players would prefer a few easier tests. Still, the fight has often been Djokovic’s experience at Wimbledon, a place of events with garlands for him, however.
That is their strength. He is one of the great fighters of the game, a player with extraordinary reserves of self-confidence, accumulated through many campaigns at the highest level. In fact, he’s probably more vulnerable in the shorter forms of the game than on the big stage, because it’s the best of five where champions thrive. It is the battlefield that separates the great players from the very good ones, the established kings from the young princes.
Sinner is one of these princes, 20 years old, and one day he will surely have a kingdom of his own. If it’s Wimbledon, it will have a fan-prepared audience. On Tuesday they rose again and again to acclaim their mad cross-country right, their perverse service, and their total freshness. He was also shown when he defeated the Spanish prodigy, Carlos Alcaraz, in the fourth round two days earlier.
This was another afternoon where one had to wonder if he could make a big breakthrough. He was excellent in making two sets before Djokovic got close to the fight for three hours and 35 minutes to win 5-7, 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-2. It was the first quarterfinal of Sinner’s Slam. The win led Djokovic to his eleventh Wimbledon semifinal.
“It was a tough match,” Sinner acknowledged. “I knew it before. I was playing well and he raised his level during [the] fourth [set]. and I think I played the fifth one the right way, I just missed the final shots. I think I can be proud of what I have done here. “
Jannik Sinner throws a right to Djokovic. Photography: Tom Jenkins / The Guardian
Everything is delivered with the right amount of quiet humility missing from other parts of the Wimbledon forest. And it recognizes margins until they decide great results.
“When you have two sets to love, you play all the sets in the best way possible. In the third, when I was serving and it was love-15, I hit an easy live on the net: love-30. Then he played a good point. “Instead of being between 15 and 30, he was 40, and then he broke me. From then on he played better.”
It sounds simple, but far from it. Djokovic had to dig deep into all his reserves to flood Sinner’s confidence. He has done so for so long against the best in the history of the game that it is second nature to him.
As he said on the court, “As for the first two sets, compared to the last three, we’ve probably had two different games. He was the best player for two sets. “
He later said of his mixed opening: “I thought I started really well, I had 4-1 up front and a break point for double break. He served well. I was playing against the wind and I just played a very good game. bad, two double fouls, two missed fall shots to lose the 4-3 serve, and the momentum shifted to his side. “
And being the best player for two sets won’t win anyone a five-set match.
“Then I went out and paused for the sink and a little encouragement in the mirror,” he revealed. He did the trick, just as it had worked for Andy Murray when he took a break after four sets and came back to beat Djokovic in the 2012 U.S. Open final.
The new day here, Djokovic started fast, faded quickly and recovered slowly. Sinner played very well to win the first set in just under an hour, and even better to make two sets.
The youngest player to break the top 10 since Juan Martín del Potro in 2008, Sinner played tennis beyond his years. His face, above all, was expressionless. Even when he fell hard and broke his ankle towards the end of the fourth set, he returned after a brief treatment as if nothing had happened.
He will come back, and win big titles, maybe even this one, on a surface that is still new to him.