HE was calm and he was reflective but the overwhelming feeling, as Novak Djokovic’s defence of his French Open title ended in the quarter-finals here yesterday, was that the Serb doesn’t know what’s happened to his game or how he’s going to get out of it.
Djokovic, who dominated the men’s game for three years until he fell off the pedestal last summer, was beaten 7-6 6-3 6-0 by Dominic Thiem, a 23-year-old Austrian who is into the last four for the second year in a row.
But it wasn’t just that he was beaten, or that he was outplayed. He fought well in the first set and had two set points on the Thiem serve at 5-4. It was that, in a third set in which he won just eight points, it looked like the fight had gone.
For Djokovic, whose career has been built around his fighting spirit and his defensive resilience, that is a horrible place to be and he hinted he could even take a break from the game.
“Trust me, I'm thinking about many things, especially in the last couple of months,” Djokovic said. “I'm just trying to sense what's the best thing for me now.
“Obviously there have been a lot of changes with the team and so forth. So excited to work with Andre [Agassi] and the new team. At the same time, I have responsibility to the game itself; towards others.
“We'll see. Obviously it's not an easy decision to make, but I will see how I feel after Roland Garros and then decide what to do next.”
With Wimbledon around the corner, it is unlikely that Djokovic will choose to miss the tournament, but his former coach Boris Becker urged him yesterday to sort out his coaching situation sooner rather than later.
“Agassi missed the second week when Djokovic needed him there the most,” said Becker, who is working for Eurosport here. “He has to find a new tour-coach. This has to happen fast and not during Wimbledon because Djokovic has to take advantage of the next three or four weeks to come back.”
At 30, with one son and a second child on the way, Djokovic may be struggling for motivation but he says he will work to push himself back to the top.
“I know I am not playing close to my best," he said. "It's obviously tough to get out of. I know that I have achieved the biggest heights in this sport, and that memory and that experience gives me enough reason to believe that I can do it again.”
Thiem will now play nine-time champion Rafael Nadal in the semis and he knows there is still a long way to go.
“It’s a joke how hard it is to win a slam,” he said. “I beat Novak. On Friday is Nadal. In the finals there is another top star.”
Djokovic hammered Thiem 6-1 6-0 in Rome last month but the biggest surprise is that today’s result wasn’t really a surprise. He may not be able to get it back.
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