MELBOURNE—Tennis aficionados had been waiting for this battle of the ball carvers, and for once a highly anticipated match went beyond its billing. Bernard Tomic and Alexandr Dolgopolov carved the ball every which way, and often the same way, for dozens of shots at a time. Much of the match saw the two of them in a position you don’t see too many players in these days: Hunched over, in the middle of the court, just inside the baseline, sending wide-arcing, side-spinning, one-handed backhands back and forth to each other.
The fun began when one of them decided to break loose from that pattern. Then they were sent careening all over the court, into the doubles alleys and beyond to make full-stretch gets; up to the net for drop shots and right back to the baseline to track down lobs. As Tomic said afterward, it was like looking into a mirror. It’s hard to imagine there have been many matches that have put together as much collective touch and feel on a tennis court at one time as this one. With each rally, each shot, cat became mouse, mouse became cat.
It wasn’t just the stylistic similarities that made it interesting; it was the contrasts in their strengths and weaknesses as well. The match pitted a player with superior weapons and speed—Dolgopolov—against a tougher, craftier competitor in Tomic. They produced a match with little sense of order or sustained momentum. It was impossible to tell what was coming from shot to shot or game to game. Tomic got up a break in the first; Dolgopolov came back to win the set. The roles were reversed in the second. In the third set, Dolgopolov went up an early break again, before the two ended up in what would basically be the match-deciding tiebreaker. The differences in their competitive skills were crystallized by their tiebreaker records coming into the match—23-23 for Dolgo; 19-7 for Tomic. They would be crystallized again in this breaker.
Dolgopolov had refrained from going after his drive backhand for much of the match. He was content to slice with Tomic and look for his forehand. Now, in the breaker, he went on the attack to go up 5-3. But he chose that moment to play it safe and wait for a mistake. Tomic hit a forehand winner and went on his own mini-roll to 6-5. The final turning point of the set came at 6-6, when Dolgopolov took an easy midcourt forehand and overcooked it wide. Tomic was soon up two sets to one.
That would be it, right? No way the often-ambivalent Dolgo was coming back from that. But the surprises weren’t over, as he raised his game one more time, despite getting treatment for a back injury, and ran away with the fourth. In the end, though, it was the craftier competitor, rather than the bigger hitter, who came through. Tomic stopped Dolgopolov’s momentum at the start of the fifth by saving two break points in his opening service game. He began to attack with his forehand earlier in rallies, and he showed no fear closing it out.
One reservation: At the start of the fifth set, Dolgopolov hit a ball that landed close to the baseline. It sounded like someone called "out" from the crowd. When no call came from the linesman or umpire, it appeared that Tomic signaled with his racquet that he wanted to challenge. Dolgopolov either saw that move, or heard the fan in the crowd, or both, because he stopped playing and missed the next ball, thinking that the point was already over. He claimed to have been hindered, but umpire Carlos Ramos said the point was over and it belonged to Tomic. If Dolgo was complaining about Tomic signaling (and I don’t know because I’m writing this before the press conferences), Tomic should have offered to replay the point.
Whatever the case was on that point (and Dolgopolov went on to hold serve anyway), it doesn't dim the fact that there was a great, star-is-born atmosphere in Laver tonight, and that the match we saw was literally dead even—4-6, 7-6(0), 7-6(6), 2-6, 6-3; 174 points each. While we’ve witnessed these types of evenings for Tomic before here, he played a man’s match this time, coming back to reverse the momentum multiple times, and forcing himself out of his passive comfort zone and onto the attack at the right moments. While he moves on to play Roger Federer Sunday, all tennis aficionados should savor this one for a second. Our ball carvers turned into sculptors tonight, and they sculpted a strange, inimitable masterpiece together.
—Steve Tignor