Andy Murray came out of his service stance and stared up at the retractable roof, where a bird was squawking. It kept squawking. He banged his strings off his palm, unhappy with the tension, and sent a couple of defective racquets off to be restrung. A few points after picking up a new frame, he was banging that one against his palm, too. Murray yelled at his player’s box to give him more energy. He barked at the ball kids to bring him his towel, please. He winced after dozens of shots, either in anguish or in pain. Even the chair umpire had it in for him. When Murray questioned why an obvious out call hadn’t been made, he said that umpire Jake Garner “bit back” at him. It was that kind of night.
More important, of course, were the bites that Novak Djokovic took out of Murray. I had expected the Serb to come out firing, the way he had against Roger Federer—why change a winning game; more precisely, why change that winning game. But he started easily, feeling the match out, trying a little of Murray’s style before he got around to his own. I thought it was a mistake; I though he was showing too much respect for Murray’s defense. I was wrong.
The measured game turned out to be the right game for Djokovic. It settled him in and allowed him to open up and find his range at his own pace. The shift was subtle, but before you knew it, he was controlling points without taking a lot of risk. He broke it open at 5-4, 15-30. Over the course of a 39-shot rally, Djokovic gave us offense, then defense, then offense, then defense, then O, then D, and on, and on, until he’d won the point and changed the entire match in the process.
“That made a big difference in the momentum,” Murray said. “He really loosened up after that.”
“I was changing the pace, changing the rhythm,” Djokovic said. “I didn’t want to give him the same pace. I wanted to open up the court more and not let him control the points.”
Djokovic loosened up in a big way in the second. There was a Federer-esque, full-flight quality to his performance through the first five games of that set. It was no fluke, either; it was the logical end to two weeks, and two months, of excellent play. In fact, now that I write that, there were also moments over his last three matches when I was reminded of the single-minded, well-regulated aggression that he had brought to the Davis Cup final last December. Somebody on this blog called Djokovic’s form at the Hopman Cup a few weeks ago “ominous.” I had never associated that word with the happy Perth exo before, but he or she was right. He was ominous right up until the final point tonight.
“After we won the Davis Cup,” Djokovic said, “I was feeling great being on the court. I think that had a big effect on this tournament for me.”
What effect did Murray's injury from Friday have on him? He strained a quad in his semifinal, and as he said tonight he wasn’t moving well. There were moments when he clearly pulled up lame, and other moments when he grimaced—though he’s always kind of grimacing out there. Murray said he wasn’t hurt, but maybe a little weary from his last match. Either way, he began the match tight, went straight to agitated, and by the third was pretty well slumped. He played his usual game to a fault. Weary or injured or neither, he failed to change the points’ dynamics, failed to move forward on numerous occasions when he had the chance, and failed to relax at any point and just compete. And there’s always his fundamental issue: a forehand that’s not as powerful or as versatile as most of his opponents’, including Djokovic’s. The Serb can do anything from anywhere with his forehand; Murray can’t. A Slam will likely always elude him unless he can get more out of that stroke.
Of course, whatever you do on your side, you still have to get the ball past Djokovic, which no one in Melbourne found a way to do very often.
“He put up three or four lobs,” Murray said, “that landed right on the line. It’s tough to do anything with those.” On the third of those lobs, Murray looked back down at the line in annoyed disbelief after the point. “How can he put it there?” he seemed to be asking. After the match, Murray was glum, naturally, but he said he felt a lot better than he had after his defeat by Roger Federer last year. Murray claimed that he wasn’t sure why this was, but before the match tonight, he said that in 2010 he had been especially crushed by the squandered set points in the third-set tiebreaker. He never got that far this time. Let’s hope he recovers more quickly than last year.
This match did not signal anything so extreme as a changing of the guard. But it was perhaps the first Grand Slam final contested by the players who came up in the so-far-unnamed “slow-court era.” The combination of modern frames, modern strings, modern physicality, and modern slow courts have produced a distinct style, which Djokovic and Murray both embody. It’s a style of moderation, one that works on all surfaces. It revolves around two-handed backhands that serve as weapons; strong returns and versatile, rather than blistering, serves; a blend of offense and defense; an ability to change the direction of the ball at any time; a basic competence in all aspects of the sport rather than the reliance on a couple of huge weapons; and an emphasis on speed above else.
Every style has its virtuoso performers, and tonight Djokovic showed us that the slow-court game, at its best, can be as dazzling and beautiful as any other. To see it with Djokovic, though, you have to isolate on him. Watch him move. Watch him dance and leap back there—he can play D, then O, then D, then O. His legs look rubbery when he comes down in a split step. He flies low at all times, and he doesn’t have to turn his body away from the net to get a good cut. Where other players' show-off moves are their bomb serves or their inside-out forehands, The Serb’s is the open-stance, abbreviated-swing, sliding backhand get in the corner. It's worth a look.
If Djokovic can track down another player’s best shot with that move and flip a lob into the rafters that lands like a laser on the baseline, there’s only one word for it. Andy Murray knew it early tonight; the rest of the men's tour might be thinking it right now: That’s ominous.