KEITH JACKSON
disease as recently as December 16. In which case, if the reports are correct, then he thought nothing of putting the health of children at risk the following day when he was pictured hugging kids at an award ceremony for the Tennis Association of Belgrade. Which is probably even worse.
So, please, spare me the candle light vigils and the weeping mother routine which was rolled out again yesterday when the Djokovic family held its latest live press conference to keep the world updated on their boy’s heroic struggle against the forces of tyranny and oppression. Remember, this breathtaking drama all began when he faced the sheer indignity of spending three nights in a sub-standard hotel. Possibly with a pea placed beneath his mattress.
Devastated at the very thought of her little Prince being put through such a gruelling injustice, Dijana Đokovic kept a straight face through her quivering bottom lip as she pleaded for some sort of commonsense to prevail. “As a mother, what can I say? You can just imagine how I feel, I feel terrible since yesterday, the last 24 hours.” Let’s cut her some slack. Dijana may just have been informed that Nigel Farage was hurriedly scrambling to the Serbian capital to offer some comfort to the family in their hour of crisis.
As if this circus didn’t have one too many clowns already, Farage’s sense of duty and moral outrage meant he had no option but to drop everything and ride to the rescue of one of the wealthiest dynasties anywhere in the sporting world. God bless his greedy, little right-wing socks.
A defiant Djokovic, meanwhile, was busting out of his Aussie incarceration hellhole, chauffeured away from this ghastly grubbiness straight to the luxurious Rod Laver Arena for a knockabout with his support staff and displaying the charmless lack of self awareness which got him into all this bother in the first place.
When he flew to Australia from Spain last week he trumpeted his imminent arrival on social media like some sort of globe-trotting Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The sense of entitlement was quite staggering, gloating as he did about being granted ‘exemption permission’ to enter a country which has been in and out of lockdown for the best part of the past two years.
The Aussies have not been messing about. From day one