Condensing the action works better for some sports than others, but it feels crucial as viewing options keep expandingApparently, the US Open men’s final on Sunday night was incredible. I wouldn’t know; I only saw the highlights. Which, as everyone knows, is by far the least satisfying way of watching a tennis match: inferior in many ways to watching nothing. For some reason tennis has always been strangely resistant to the highlights treatment: a game of infinite pivots and infinite crises, where every apparent turning point merely heralds the next, where its most epic passages feel like the world is ending again and again and again. Abridging all this feels somehow wrong, faithless: like trying to sum up Like a...
The world No 1 has previous for poor behaviour and judgment, and both were in evidence on Sunday as he threw away the chance to win an 18th majorFor most of his career, Novak Djokovic has been chasing a shadow. And how close he was to catching the ageless king, Roger Federer. How desperate he was to wear his crown. How shattered he now is after an evening of madness at Flushing Meadows.When the world No 1 took a spare ball from his pocket after being broken against the run of play near the end of the first set in his fourth-round match with the Spaniard Pablo Carreño Busta, and sent it spinning innocently towards the back of the court,...
The 38-year-old is seeking a 24th slam but there are hurdles to overcome at the US Open, starting with Maria Sakkari on MondayNobody in tennis suffers for her art like Serena Williams – except maybe her one-time doubles partner, Andy Murray. On the women’s Tour, nobody retreats into her own world so completely under pressure, external and self-induced, to then emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis and fly free.For as long as she stays in the fight this week at Flushing Meadows, the greatest player of her generation will become more introspective, irascible, monosyllabic and explosive in pursuit of a 24th grand slam title. If she wins the final point of the tournament to move alongside Margaret Court after...
The USTA has done a phenomenal job staging this tournament, but avoidable cock-ups have distracted from some great tennisThe Great Mannarino Mystery should have been no matryoshka moment, no doll-within-a-doll episode of Poirot in Lockdown City, but an open discussion about the haunting issue of this 2020 US Open: the virus and its fallout.Instead, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) was temporarily paralysed by commercial sensitivity and legal timidity when New York health suits decided they wanted a walk-on part in the drama, and engaged Adrian Mannarino in discussions that dragged on for so long his third-round match against Alexander Zverev started nearly three hours late. He lost. So did tennis. It was a look-at-me moment for one set of...
Serb launches player rebellion against the game’s ruling body by assembling his masked rebels on a Flushing Meadows courtAt first glance, Novak Djokovic’s uprising at the Battle of Flushing Meadows looked to be as clumsily executed as Arthur Scargill’s 1984 miner’s strike. A leader with career earnings of more than $$140m and probably worth twice that has asked his troops, struggling after almost six months without work, to risk their careers bang in the middle of a crippling pandemic and with winter only a couple of months away.Yet, as with the old Yorkshire comb-over, it is hard not to sympathise with him, and his followers. They want more fairness, more money for their poorest members, a bigger say in the...