“In the third set, on set point, I had a forehand, and I went for it, and missed it. You know, that’s what these kinds of guys like (Jannik) Sinner and (Carlos) Alcaraz particularly present on the court. They put pressure, they’re constantly on you, and they increase the pressure as the match progresses. The opportunities presented are very rare. And that makes you a little more anxious. You want to go for the shot. That’s what happened. And I missed.”
We probably just watched Novak Djokovic’s last match at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. It’s possible that he will come back one more time. But I don’t think so.
For the record, he lost that match to Jannik Sinner in straight sets. The scores of the sets were close because he’s Novak Djokovic — the best to ever play this sport, the best because for two decades he has been able to shape shift into whatever sort of player he needs to be to meet the moment.
But Jannik Sinner is unbothered by shape-shifting. There’s a scene in one of the Avengers movies, doesn’t matter which, where Spider-Man (I think) keeps popping through space portals and attacking the ultra-villain Thanos in a variety of ways. Thanos puts up with this for a short while, almost out of amusement, and then when he’s grown tired of act, he reached out with his arm, grabbed Spidey by the throat and dispatched him.
This was Sinner. Djokovic blooped high balls, floated drop shots, charged the net, cracked ferocious returns, dropped back way behind the baseline so he could just get back every ball, moved Sinner from side to side … and Sinner calmly parried those advances and then when he grew tired of the game, he grabbed Novak by the neck and hit a screaming winner that ended the silliness.
It was really quite simple.
Novak Djokovic at 38 is not as good as Jannik Sinner.
And here’s how you know: Read that quote above again, the one about Djokovic going for broke when he had a set point … then hitting his shot wide. That’s a poignant quote for a simple reason: This is EXACTLY what Novak has done to other players for the last two decades. He has suffocated them, throttled them, smothered them, and then when they got the rare chance to take a set from him, they would as often as not try to do too much and miss.
They would try to do too much because they knew: Novak was better than them.
And Novak knows: Sinner is better than him.
Djokovic knows that Sinner is better than him … and Carlos Alcaraz is better than him … and on many days, Jack Draper and Lorenzo Musetti and 20-year-old Arthur Fils and 19-year-old Jakob Mensik and others are just better than he is. He’s reached that age. Djokovic is still a wonder. He’s still good enough at 38 to get to the semifinals of the French Open. He’s still good enough to outclass the No. 3 player in the world, Alexander Zverev, in a grueling match on the red clay.
But he’s no longer good enough to win the French Open, and he knows it. Djokovic might still harbor dreams of winning on the grass at Wimbledon or on the blazing fast hardcourts of the Australian Open because he understands those surfaces in a way none of the kids do. Wimbledon is coming up, so we’ll see if that hope is real.
But he knows right now that he can’t win the French again.
And knowing that, I can’t see him playing the French again.
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