Advantage Djokovic in twilight classic duel
Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic will have to come back at 1pm this afternoon to finish their semi-final after nine hours on Centre Court proved insufficient to complete two men’s matches yesterday.
When the roof arrived at Wimbledon in 2009, the agreement with Merton Council was that play could continue until 11pm but no longer. And after Kevin Anderson and John Isner smashed the record for the longest Centre Court match in history, Nadal and Djokovic were only able to start their own epic at a little after 8pm.
The crowd were understandably frustrated by the absence of a decisive verdict after 2hr 53min of play, which finished with Djokovic leading 6-4, 3-6, 7-6. But what a day of tennis they had witnessed. Even in the final moments, as announcements echoed around the grounds suggesting that patrons should consider their transport options, almost every seat remained filled. This was what men’s tennis had been missing for the past 18 months, ever since the 2017 Australian Open final that represented the most recent best-of-five-set clash between two members of the Big Four.
There is nothing to match the texture and class of these occasions. The Big Four do not have a monopoly on world-class tennis, but what they can offer is deep history – and no pair of players have ever had as much history as Djokovic and Nadal.
This was their 52nd meeting on the tour, and watching it felt like a first trip back to the sweet shop after giving up chocolate for Lent. How we had missed this head-on collision of legends, Sir David Attenborough – who sat enraptured in the Royal Box alongside survival expert Bear Grylls – can scarcely have seen many bigger beasts on his journeys around the blue planet.
The exalted level of some of these points is hard to convey, but Nadal – who was a little slow to find his range in the first set – finished the evening with the sort of highlights reel you would rarely see outside a visual effects department.
There were impossibly deft drop shots struck on a dead run, and skyhooks from the school of basketball great Kareem Abdul-jabbar. Nadal even came up with multiple service winners on break-point down – the sort of thing you expect from a six-and-a-half-foot beanpoles but not the shortest man in the last four.
Meanwhile Djokovic was a little less flashy but no less effective. He has clearly reached the point where he has total faith in his body again, after the elbow struggles that afflicted him last year. You could tell that from the first game, as he leapt into a lasso forehand from the school of Nadal with total freedom and fluidity.
Djokovic’s backhand was in a class of its own. To avoid being pushed back by Nadal, you have to be able to take his vicious forehand on the rise, even when he fires it deep into your backhand swing, and Djokovic is the master here.
There was no doubt who had fought out the tougher quarterfinal. Nadal had required 4hr 48min to subdue Juan Martin del Potro in a match that Andy Murray, commentating for the BBC, described as the best he had ever seen live.
This probably explains why Nadal did not quite find his all-court press in the first set. He looked like a man working his way up to optimal operating temperature, and he left too many short balls for Djokovic to feast on with flat, driven groundstrokes into the corners.
But just as Nadal found solutions against Del Potro on Wednesday – when he came forward and used his volleys and drop-shots to break up the violence of the baseline exchanges – so he came up with an answer last night. This time it was his forehand down the line, which he hits with both feet pointing straight up the court in defiance of the coaching textbook. Time after time, he threaded the ball over the high part of the net for a winner.
The third-set tie-break was a ripper, as both men did all they could to avoid the nightmarish prospect of a night spent sleeping on a oneset deficit. The drop shots flowed from both ends now, creating the sort of variety that Anderson and Isner, for all their qualities, could only dream of. However, it was that Djokovic backhand that claimed the final point of the evening, as he drew a forced error from Nadal with a ball speared up the line.