Gilles Simon ranged to his left and slid into his backhand. He was stretching to retrieve a Novak Djokovic ground stroke from behind the baseline, but it was a shot that the Frenchman had been making all afternoon in Monte Carlo. More than that, Simon had been using that shot to do what Djokovic so often does with his own sliding defensive backhand: Turn the tables and take the offensive in rallies.
For more than two hours, those rallies had been some of the most entertaining we’d seen all season. With their sharp-angled forehands, counter-punching backhands, change-of-pace touch shots and delicately measured lobs, Djokovic and Simon had pulled each other side to side and up and back. And when that wasn’t enough for one point, they’d do it again. More than once, Djokovic took a moment to join in the applause for a piece of Simon brilliance.
Now it was time for Simon to make that brilliance mean something, to convert all of those point-winning shots into a match-winning performance. A few minutes earlier, he had broken Djokovic at 4-4 with a bullet down-the-line forehand. And a few seconds earlier, Simon had watched a routine Djokovic forehand fly over the baseline to make the score 15-15. Clearly, this match was his for the taking.