Breeze for Djokovic but will he wake up and smell the coffee?
Like that of an unbreakable Lego figurine, his hair didn’t move and there was never a single bead of sweat, while all around him perspired and expired. Didn’t it seem that Novak Djokovic was going to reign supreme forever?
But there he was back at Wimbledon where it all started to go wrong 12 months before with a defeat which sent shock-waves round SW19 and a surge of schadenfreude across the crowd watching eventual champion Andy Murray.
Djokovic hoped to sweat yesterday, the first match of the rest of his career, the first major with Andre Agassi super-coaching from his box. But in the end Martin Klizan could only give him 40 minutes before retiring hurt when down 6-3, 2-0.
Djokovic was the opponent Murray was never going to be able to outrun, the Serb born a week after the Scot who was casting long shadows across tennis courts in no time. He was the man who was going to usurp Rafael Nadal and overhaul Roger Federer until that loss to America’s Sam Querrey triggered a sequence of erratic performances so out of character that he decided drastic action was required.
He split with his coach and key support staff but not Pepe Imaz, dubbed the player’s peace ‘n’ love guru, who took on a more frontof-house role. Then Djokovic announced Agassi was to be his new super-coach, although the arrangement got off to stuttering start – spluttered like a Gaggia in fact, the American being busily engaged in ambassadorial duties for an Italian coffee manufacturer.
But Agassi, a former world No 1 himself, was in Djokovic’s box as Klizan of Sloconfuse vakia stood across the net. These two were the latest to join the cast of what has seemed like an especially overwrought soap opera complete with dark mutterings about lead character Djokovic’s “personal problems”.
It’s tempting, though insulting, to think of him as being robot-like. But we shouldn’t Djoko with Zokko, a mechanical children’s favourite from Bygone TV. It was a compliment, though a back-handed one, to suggest that Djokovic was like some brilliant computer, programmed to always win. But malfunctions-occur–vizthe Maybot after Theresa May believed in her own invincibility enough to call a snap general election. In his dramatic form-crash, Djokovic has proved to the cynics that he’s human after all.
The crowd saw some mortal tennis here. Though he won at Eastbourne to warm up for Wimbledon, the player who’s since slipped to No 4 in the world really needed a stiffer challenge than the one the ultimately hirpling Klizan could offer. Djokovic wasn’t as icily controlled as the Centre Court remembered him, nor as imperious. It was too soon to judge, based on too little evidence.
John Mcenroe for one thinks the hippie vibe might have neutered Djokovic’s “killer instinct” but Agassi can visualise a happy ending to the melodrama. He won’t be paid for his tutoring but he reckons his charge can kill again. All Djokovic needs are the “right tools” and he can supply. He can do coffee and he can do tools.