!Novak1
by Pete Bodo
MIAMI, Fla.—Perhaps they made a mistake putting the Rafael Nadal vs. Novak Djokovic match on the stadium court at Crandon Park. It might have been more appropriate to have these two guys meet in some dark tavern with sawdust on floor and classic rock on the jukebox, somewhere out on Highway 1, because what these two staged today at the Sony Ericsson Open was your basic bar fight.
It was less strategic than physical, less tactical than mental. More bitter than artful. Instead of nuance, it offered collision. It was less pretty than gritty. For almost three-and-a-half hours (3:31 to be exact), the top two players in the world slugged it out, throwing punches that were always punishing, sometimes chillingly effective (if never long enough to give one or the other man the long-term edge), and sometimes wild and wasteful.
Don't you just love hard-court tennis, which these days is basically a race in which both men (and more and more often, women) start out hitting the crap out of the ball and then just escalate the pace from there, until one or the other blows up or steamrolls his opponent? Probing and modulation are going out of style; is it too much of a cheap shot to say they're going the way of...Roger Federer, which is one of the reasons so many fans still love Federer and always will?
Nowadays, that which we would call the "rally" shot is an endangered stroke destined—it sometimes seems—to become something like an analog watch in the digital age, or the Walkman in an iPod world.
The most interesting aspect of today's match was that it featured an unexpectedly high number of service breaks—four—in the first 12 games, and then none whatsoever from the third game of the second set until Djokovic threw the last punch in the tiebreaker and flung his arms into the air, like the heavyweight champion that he's become. The score was 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (4), and while it looked near the end that Djokovic was running out of steam, it was Nadal who grew so arm weary that he could barely throw another jab. He lost the first three points he served in the tiebreaker, at which point he was cooked—in more ways than one.
As he said later in his presser, "Was very, very hot outside there today. I sweat crazy, like ten T?shirts today. So I was very tired at the end. Seriously, very tired. One of those kind of matches, it's better to finish as soon as possible, because I was very, very tired at the end."
One of the main reasons this one developed into a war of attrition was that, at the outset, each man invested a lot of hope in his serve. But as the match wore on, it was clear that neither man was going to reap the rewards of aces, unreturnables or serves so commanding that they enabled him to grab the upper hand in the rallies.
Djokovic: "I had lots of winners and I decreased the number of unforced errors coming into the second set, which was important to me. I wanted, you know, to make him play an extra shot, not give him a lot of free points, and try to get some free points out of serve, which wasn't happening that much. (Ultimately), I had to work—both of us had to work for each point in this match, especially in the third set."
Nadal: "I probably didn't serve as well as I did during all the tournament. Well, I didn't serve as bad as I served in Indian Wells, but the thing is, my serve didn't help me today to start the points with a little bit of advantage."
Nothing at the beginning of the match pointed toward what we were ultimately in for. Djokovic made numerous errors and was quickly down two breaks, an alarming turn of events for a man who had held all 40 of his service games at this event. But a curious thing happened in the seventh game, with Nadal leading 5-1. It appeared that Nadal, ordinarily a player who fights his heart out regardless of the score, seemed to allow Djokovic a fairly easy hold by not investing an enormous amount of energy into scoring anothr break. It was as if, with a two-break edge, he just wanted to get on with it.
