Australian produced his best in the first set of the Wimbledon men’s final but was ground down by an inscrutable opponentNick, you will be back. Hmm. Will he, though? There was the sense of a slightly awkward set of wedding speeches about the ceremonials at the end of this men’s Wimbledon singles final, a four-set victory for Novak Djokovic that seemed, for all the quality of the tennis, to be oddly inevitable from about 50 minutes in.This was, of course, a Djokovic story once again but then men’s tennis has basically been a Djokovic story for the last 10 years. Here the lineal world No 1 was utterly clinical, his levels vertiginously high, riding out a sublime first set when...
The Australian leads the head-to-head 2-0 but his record against top 10 players in best-of-five-set matches is alarmingIt has been seven long years since a 19-year-old Nick Kyrgios reached the second of his two career grand slam quarter-finals up to that point. Between his big wins over big players and the controversy he courts everywhere he goes, his public profile has only grown in the years since but his notoriety did not correlate with greater success on the court.This year, though, the Australian has turned a corner. He arrived at Wimbledon playing the best, most consistent tennis of his career and has used it to blaze a trail into his first grand slam final. Continue reading...
What is the plan, the protocol, the policy when allegations about athletes are aired? The ATP is one governing body that must do betterSo much for the good times. The show will go on for Nick Kyrgios at Wimbledon, starting on Wednesday with a quarter-final against Cristian Garin, the first of three hypothetical steps towards a long-shot first grand slam title win. But for now the party, the bunting, the King Nick buzz, is over.Sport loves to spin these stories. Over the past 10 days Kyrgios had seemed to be turning into one of the English summer’s chief objects of fascination, a brilliant, charismatic tennis player; albeit a brilliant, charismatic tennis player with some obvious deference issues, clothing issues, politeness...
Australian remains box office but he let his tennis do the talking in a controlled fourth-round victory on Centre CourtJust when you think you know someone, that’s when they go and let you down. On a balmy afternoon in front of a fond, even – whisper it – quietly adoring Centre Court crowd, Nick Kyrgios confirmed his own mercurial nature, his basic inconsistency by remaining controlled, rigidly polite and an all-round model pro and steady guy throughout this fourth-round win against Brandon Nakashima.In victory Kyrgios was gushingly courteous towards his 20-year-old opponent. He paid tribute to his girlfriend (“the best girlfriend in the world”), referenced his many friends in tennis and namechecked his many excellent conversations with “Andy”. He even...
The brash Australian is a divisive but definitely modern figure, and the embodiment of sport in the social media ageIn the mid-90s, when the internet was all prairie-land as far as you could see, there was a genuine feeling this new frontier was a force for enlightenment. Here was a space where the shared human essence could coalesce and commune, a pure shore on which the future would be crafted by gentle, unhurried humans with bulbous green Apple Macintoshes, concerned only with upcycling blogs and really cool typefaces and artisan bagel houses in Prague.The reality has of course been a little different. It turns out our shared human essence isn’t a mild dove-like thing, but is instead an ambient swamp...