GOATs are humans, too: Novak Djokovic’s 33-match Australian Open win streak comes to an end

There were a few moments early in Novak Djokovic’s on Friday that, in hindsight, should have let us know this match wasn’t going to go according to the Serb’s usual Australian Open script.

In the second game, Djokovic snapped off one of his trademark heavy crosscourt forehands. The shot may be the most underrated in his arsenal; it lets him push his opponent wide, without taking on a lot of risk. Normally, if he hits it right, it’s enough to give him an advantage in the rally. This time, he hit it right, but he didn’t get anything out of it. The long and rangy Sinner, moving diagonally to cut off the angle, was there in plenty of time to fire back a bigger, better—and louder— crosscourt forehand of his own that Djokovic couldn’t handle.

Later in that game, Djokovic and Sinner rallied crosscourt. Djokovic is one of the best ever at breaking that type of pattern and sending a backhand down the line that busts open the point. This time Sinner beat him to the punch with the same shot. His down-the-liner put Djokovic into scramble mode, and Sinner eventually finished the point, and broke serve, with a swing volley. The 22-year-old Sinner was doing what the 36-year-old Djokovic has been doing to his opponents for nearly two decades.

If the early signs were good for Sinner, they were equivalently bad for Djokovic.

In the third game, Sinner approached to Djokovic’s forehand side and came to net. Djokovic’s forehand pass is another underrated but crucial weapon; it saved him at Wimbledon in 2018 and 2019. This time, Sinner’s approach had more pace than he anticipated. Djokovic took a big hack, but couldn’t control the ball, which caromed off his string, with no spin or shape, and landed five feet wide.

That dynamic remained largely unchanged for the next four sets. Sinner asked the questions, and Djokovic never came up with the answers. Almost as surprising was how little emotional resistance he mustered. He didn’t rant or explode after errors, and he offered only a few token triumphal fist-pumps to` his faithful fans in the moments when things did go his way. He didn’t even take a bathroom break and have a talk with the “man in the mirror” after going down two sets to love.

Afterward, Djokovic couldn’t find a good explanation for his flat performance.

“I was, in a way, shocked with my level,” he said. “There was not much I was doing right in the first two sets. I guess this is one of the worst Grand Slam matches that I’ve played.”

Djokovic said he “managed to kind of raise the level a little bit in the third,” and he did save a match point in the tiebreaker with a deep backhand drive that handcuffed Sinner. But Djokovic frittered away that belated momentum when he was broken, from 40-0 up, early in the fourth set.

Djokovic said there wasn’t enough time in a press conference to go over all the things that were wrong with his game on Friday.

“Everything, you know, was just subpar.”

Two stats pop out: Djokovic made 54 errors to Sinner’s 28, and he didn’t earn a single break point (for the first time in his career, per Tennis Abstract.). According to him, it was his inability to put any pressure on Sinner’s serve that set the tone.

“Probably that stat says a lot,” Djokovic said of his return-game futility.

“If you serve well and if you don’t face a break point,” he said of Sinner, “it plays with the mind of your opponent, meaning you can put more pressure on his service games, my service games in this case, and you kind of swing freely.”

When was the last time Djokovic lost a match at a major in this fashion? Last year Carlos Alcaraz beat him in a classic Wimbledon final, but he wasn’t flat. He has lost to Nadal at Roland Garros, but that’s Nadal at Roland Garros. He went down to Daniil Medvedev in the 2021 US Open final, but exhaustion played a role there. I’d say you have to go back to his last defeat at Melbourne Park, to Denis Istomin six years ago, to find a similarly head-scratching performance.

Sinner is head-and-shoulders above Istomin, of course, and he played a big part in putting Djokovic on the defensive. He had the Serb swinging late and uncharacteristically off-balance. Sinner isn’t known for his slice, but that shot gave Djokovic fits as well.

“He just played a flawless match,” Djokovic said.

We’ve seen other players jump out to early leads against Djokovic at the majors. It’s something of a tradition by now, and everyone watching this match was waiting for Djokovic to find his range, and Sinner to get tight and lose his. The difference this time, I think, is that Sinner was coming into this match having beaten Djokovic twice, in important events, in recent months. Outside of a couple points in the third-set tiebreaker, Sinner didn’t quiver.

In the ESPN booth, John McEnroe said, “We’ve been waiting for years for someone to step up” and beat Djokovic in Melbourne. After 10 titles and 33 straight match wins, that person was Jannik Sinner.

On the flip side, we’ve also been waiting for years for Djokovic to show a sign that he’s human at this event. It’s amazing that it didn’t happen sooner, but it finally happened on Friday. That’s the only explanation necessary: GOATs are humans, too.