Mistakes Were Made

“We’re all tanking in reality,” Gilles Simon joked last week after the BBC-Buzzfeed match-fixing story broke. “Novak is nothing in reality. We’re all fixing.”

First the Frenchman came up with the best line of the controversy; then, on Sunday in Rod Laver Arena, he seemed to go out and try to prove that he wasn’t kidding. Coming into their fourth-round match, Simon was 1-9 against the world No. 1, and had lost 12 of the last 13 sets they’d played; his one and only victory came eight years ago. But by the middle of the first set yesterday, all of those numbers sounded like ancient history. Simon, it appeared, had been sent to Melbourne expressly to drive Djokovic up a wall and, maybe, just maybe, end his six-year streak of reaching the quarterfinals or better at Grand Slams.

Simon set himself up as a sort of mirror to Djokovic—a reverse Simon Says. He was content to rally with Djokovic, track everything down, and send soft, low, pace-less shots up the middle of the court. But when Djokovic tried to bring some more heat, he found that Simon could fire it right back at him. And when a shoe-top passing shot was needed, Simon came up with those, too. With the Frenchman content to let the points come to him, Djokovic was the one tasked with creating openings and finishing points. On this day, he almost wasn’t up to the task.

“You can expect unforced errors when you’re playing Gilles Simon,” Djokovic said afterward, “who is one of the best counter-punchers in the tour at the moment...He likes to play long matches. He likes to play long rallies. I knew what was expecting me on the court, but I honestly didn’t expect to make this many unforced errors.”

How many is “this many”? Djokovic would finish with an even 100 of them; according to him, it was by far the most of his career. Hey, if you’re going to go big, you might as well go really big, right? From the start, Djokovic lacked his usual crisp footwork, was late on his down-the-line ground strokes, and didn’t have the confidence to stay aggressive for long. His crosscourt return from the deuce court, usually so dangerous, landed harmlessly in the alley. Worst of all was his drop shot. Time and again, he bailed out of rallies with the backhand drop, only to watch it fall weakly into the net.

“It’s not easy when you’re not feeling the ball well, and when you’re not moving that great,” Djokovic said. “When you’re playing someone like Simon, he senses that and makes you play an extra shot. Then you’re trying to cut down on the length of the rallies, go for a winner or a drop shot. Sometimes you have a brain freeze, if I can call it that way. That’s what happened to me many times with those drop shots.”

Later, Djokovic got a vote of support from his rival, and another occasional victim of Simon’s, Roger Federer.

“How much did you see Gilles Simon play?” Federer asked a reporter who brought up Djokovic’s triple-digit error count. “I think people miss the point of him. He plays every match like that. He makes you miss. He makes you go for the lines and he runs down a lot of balls...Of course there’s going to be a lot of unforced errors piling up. The question is, if you have 50, 100, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter as long as you win.”

And Djokovic did win, 6-3, 6-7 (1), 6-4, 4-6, 6-3. He made 100 errors, but he also hit 62 winners, and elicited 68 mistakes from the steady Simon. Djokovic squandered 19 break points, but he saved 14. He let leads slip in the second set and the fourth set, and was broken the first time he served for the match, at 5-1 in the fifth. Every time Djokovic found his form, he let it get away again. Yet he still won.

Now that he has advanced, we’re left with a couple of questions.

Did Simon expose a weakness in Djokovic’s game? Is counter-punching and forcing him to take the initiative the answer? Probably not. Andy Murray uses a style not unlike Simon’s, and he has just one win over Djokovic in the last three years. Simon doesn’t have a world-beating game, but he does have one that, in its patient reliance on timing, hand skills, and foot speed instead of power, is difficult to replicate.

What does playing a four-hour, 32-minute match in the middle of the tournament mean for Djokovic’s chances Down Under? At the French Open, he was worn down by having to overcome Rafael Nadal in the quarters and Murray in a two-day semi, and was beaten by Stan Wawrinka in the final. But at Wimbledon, Djokovic survived a tight five-setter against Kevin Anderson in the fourth round and cruised from there. Djokovic’s next opponent is Kei Nishikori; judging by what happened at last year's French Open, even if Nishikori doesn’t beat Djokovic, he could damage his chances of winning the whole thing.

But they don’t call Djokovic a rubber-band man for nothing. Many times in the past, he has been wildly off his game in one round, and then razor-sharp in his next match. Think of the way he slipped and slid his through a near-disastrous 2014 Wimbledon semifinal against Grigor Dimitrov, before coming out crisp and focused—and much better balanced—against Federer in the final.

Maybe "the point of Gilles Simon" was to wake the seemingly unbeatable Djokovic up to the fact that, yes, he can still be beaten.