2019 Top Matches, No. 7: Thiem d. Djokovic, Roland Garros semifinals

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Some classic matches are pristine shot-making contests, where two players calmly and coolly push each other to greater heights of brilliance. That’s not how most of us would describe Dominic Thiem’s five-set win over Novak Djokovic at Roland Garros this year.

To start, the match was played in the equivalent of a wind tunnel—or a “hurricane,” as Djokovic put it. It lasted four hours and 13 minutes over the course of two days. It was burdened by multiple rain delays and scheduling controversies. The momentum was as changeable as the weather, and both players struggled to maintain their composure as they tried to gauge what the breeze was going to do with their next shot.

Djokovic and Thiem had met a month earlier in the Madrid semifinals, and the Serb had approached that match with a determination to stay calm at all costs and not beat himself. It seemed to me that he was preparing for what he would need to do in Paris, where he would be trying to win his fourth straight major and complete his second Djoker Slam. Through his first five matches at Roland Garros, Djokovic maintained that calm, but in the semifinals he cracked. On the first day, he asked the tournament referee to stop play because of the wind. On the second day, he argued with the chair umpire, who he thought was starting the shot clock too quickly. He rushed the net with uncharacteristic abandon, and won just 35 of 71 points there. He slammed a ball against a wall, and another into the court. He kicked the clay and screamed at himself.

“Obviously, when you’re playing in hurricane conditions, it’s hard to perform your best,” said Djokovic, who hit 39 winners and committed 53 errors.

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Yet even after all of that, Djokovic nearly won. Even after all of that, he staged a feverish fifth-set rally and saved two match points with Thiem serving at 5-3. By the time Djokovic had leveled at 5-5, it looked as if he was about to do what he had done so many times on big stages in the past: Snatch a victory from deep inside the jaws of defeat.

“Somehow I had the feeling I was in the lead the whole match,” Thiem said, “and then at the end it got so tough.”

If Djokovic was busy battling the demons around him—the elements and the authorities—Thiem was fighting the demons inside him. He had never played a five-set match at Roland Garros, and he had never beaten one of the Big 3 in a contest of this consequence. At the US Open the previous fall, he had pushed Rafael Nadal to the limit before falling in the fifth-set tiebreaker. Was the same thing destined to happen to him again here?

This time history took a different turn. Rather than seizing his opportunity at 5-5, Djokovic faltered at the finish line. Rather than folding in the face of a 15-time Slam champion, Thiem gathered himself.

“The big, key point was the service game at 5-all, when I had the wind against me, and I played a really good game, and then my mind was up again,” Thiem said.

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When the two players switched sides at 6-5, Thiem had the lead and the wind at his back. Djokovic continued to miss, and Thiem was presented with a third match point. When the ball came to his backhand, he floated a slice crosscourt that pulled Djokovic into the alley and left the rest of the court wide open for his forehand. He didn’t miss.

“It was an epic match. I mean so many ups and downs and rain, going back to the locker [room], on court again...At the end, both of us could win, and I luckily got the better in the end,” said Thiem, who hit 52 winners and was 18 of 20 at net.

For Djokovic, the loss snapped his 26-match Grand Slam win streak, left him two short of another Djoker Slam, and opened the way for his GOAT-race rival, Rafael Nadal, to win his 18th major title. Afterward, Djokovic echoed Thiem’s thoughts, but from the other side of the (narrow) winner-loser divide.

“This match was always going to be tough, because Dominic is a fantastic player on clay—in general, but especially on clay,” Djokovic said. “Yeah, it’s unfortunate, you know, these kind of matches, one or two points decide a winner.”

Still, Djokovic credited Thiem—“he took it, he won it, and well done to him.” And if it had been a lesser opponent on the other side of the net, Djokovic might not have been so edgy.

The next day, Thiem would lose the Roland Garros final, as he had the year before, to Nadal. In the era of the Big 3, it takes more than one big win to achieve a breakthrough. Maybe Thiem will take the next step in Paris in 2020.