After a stuttering start to the clay-court swing, Novak Djokovic has found form at just the right moment.
Djokovic, the world No 1, said all along he would need time to find his feet on the red dirt, and that prediction has proved as accurate as the inch-perfect groundstrokes that propelled him to a sixth title at the Italian Open, where he ran out a 6-0, 7-6 (7-5) winner against Stefanos Tsitsipas, the Greek fourth seed.
With Roland Garros just a week away, and Rafael Nadal nursing the latest flare-up of his chronic foot injury, a journey that began with a shock defeat to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in Monte Carlo shows every promise of ending in glory for a third time in Paris.
That looked an unlikely prospect when Djokovic, struggling with the lingering after-effects of illness, fell off a cliff physically in the third set against Davidovich Fokina, and then faded in similar fashion against Andrey Rublev in the final of the Belgrade Open. But he has improved match by match, trusting the process, as he likes to say, and while the defeat he suffered against Carlos Alcaraz in Madrid was undoubtedly a warning shot across the bows, he will hope that his greater experience over the best-of-five-set format affords him an edge over the Spanish teenager if they cross paths again in the 16th arrondissement.
Much will hinge on whether the Serb can continue to produce tennis of the level he found in Rome, where he did not drop a set as he swept to a record-extending 38th Masters 1000 title. Against Tsitsipas, who led him by two sets to love in last year’s French Open final, Djokovic combined ruthlessness with resilience. When Tsitsipas began in desultory fashion, Djokovic turned the screw, whistling through his service games with trademark efficiency and dominating from the baseline. When the Greek’s game belatedly began to fire, Djokovic battened down the hatches, neutralising his opponent’s serve with his deep, precise returns and biding his time from the back of the court as he recovered a 5-2 deficit before edging the contest on a tiebreak.
In a season dominated by off-court controversy, it was a timely reminder of the range and adaptability of Djokovic’s game. He will take some stopping now. It remains to be seen how his endurance holds up over five sets, but the 34-year-old is otherwise looking ominously good. Djokovic arrived in Rome needing to reach the semi-finals to secure the No 1 ranking. He leaves not only with a 370th week at the top of the tree, ensuring he will go into Roland Garros as the top seed, but with his confidence restored after three consecutive victories over top-10 players. His semi-final win over Casper Ruud was his 1,000th at tour-level, behind only Nadal (1,051), Ivan Lendl (1,068) Roger Federer (1,251) and Jimmy Connors (1,274) in the open era. We are back in the familiar territory of landmarks and milestones.
Perhaps the surest sign that Djokovic is back, after his refusal to take a Covid vaccine left him almost entirely unable to compete for the first three months of the season, is that there was a sense of inevitability about the outcome. Even when Tsitsipas led, you somehow knew the Serb would find a way. As Djokovic claimed his first title since last November, the unseemly saga of his deportation from Australia before the Australian Open and subsequent inability to contest the US hard-court swing seemed nothing more than a distant memory. He is back to lifting trophies.
“It’s a relief because, after everything that happened at the beginning of the year, it was important for me to win a big title, especially with grand slams coming up where obviously I want to play my best and be at the level of confidence – more than just the game – where I want to be in order to have a chance to win the title,” said Djokovic.
“I couldn’t ask for a better week really. Played a perfect set today. Didn’t drop a set the whole tournament. I trusted the process really when I started training on clay. I did not have tournaments prior to Monte Carlo, I still felt rusty on the court. [But] I knew I’m the kind of player, particularly on clay, that needs more time, at least three, four weeks to get to the desired level. Historically, that’s always been the case.
“It’s something that I never faced before, so that amount of pressure and everything that I was feeling in the first few months of the year, as much as I’ve felt pressure in my life and my career, that was something really on a whole different level.
“But I feel it’s already behind me. I feel great on the court. Mentally as well. I’m fresh. I’m sharp. It’s just something that happened in the past.”
The focus now will be on what happens next. In a week when Nadal compared his body to an old machine that takes time to get going, Djokovic has demonstrated that his own internal engine is revving up nicely in advance of Roland Garros.