Hot, dirty, cunning, gruelling – welcome to the tennis rally in Paris

For 293 minutes the venerable hero tussles with time, irrelevance, a beaten-up body and a rival 20 years his junior. Novak Djokovic has 24 Grand Slam titles, Joao Fonseca is 19 years old. Wisdom eventually buckles to youth but not before they fence, spar, tease, torment each other for five sets.

Of 331 points, 19 are aces, two are double faults, the rest are rallies. Terse plots, drawn-out plans. Brutality, subterfuge. One 21-shot one ends with a rat-a-tat exchange at the net. Applaud me, the winner of it demands from the crowd.

It’s Paris, it’s hot, the clay clingy, the rallies like a dirty brawl, the players like sweat-stained boxers throwing punches. You can win only on points in tennis, yet losses feel like a knockout. Ask Jannik Sinner.

In the morning you might read scores, 6-3, 6-4, 7-5, but they tell you nothing. Numbers don’t reveal Andrey Rublev’s ruggedness in the rally. Statistics don’t disclose the harsh insides of matches, where sneakered professors relentlessly investigate each other’s greatness. Not all rallies are exquisite, but some will be defining.

If a match is an imaginative novel, the rally is a sentence. None are ever the same, in lyricism or intensity. William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, once wrote a sentence of over 1,200 words and rallies in Paris once felt like this when Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas played one which lasted 2min 18sec.

Now rallies are comparably shorter and yet Paris is uniquely gruelling, the brick dust like a brake on the ball, and rivals purposely trying to turn a match into a trial of grinding. Already one player left the court in a wheelchair. And he had won.

The rally is a referendum on training, a ferocious discussion on craft, a dialogue on spin, a wrestle for control, an act of defiance. “You need to have this feeling in your head,” Iga Swiatek told The Guardian, “that you’re not going to miss a ball.” Yet they do and find it incomprehensible.

The rally has electricity, two humans switched on, generating a current of creative conflict. What must it be to live inside it? Fun?

“Yes,” says Somdev Devvarman, former Indian professional who played Roger Federer at Roland Garros in 2013. “It’s so much fun. A 20-shot rally, you see a drop shot, you run, get it, s**t, he’s going to lob, you run again, it’s cat and mouse, and more so on clay.”

The rally in Paris comes with sound and unique design. Exertion becomes audible even as the court shows off the sliding scars of effort. “The dirt humbles you,” says the 41-year-old, who as a coach now is an interpreter of rallies, reading their patterns, where mistakes are coming from, who’s pulling the trigger too early.

The court is built of multiple layers (crushed gravel, coal residue, crushed limestone, brick dust) and so are rallies (spin, weight, angle, cunning). From the outside we see repartee, but on the inside they might simply be baiting rivals by hitting backhand crosses and tempting them to go down the line. “Maybe they’ll do it once,” says Devvarman, “and succeed, but once the legs wear out the same shot will be harder.”

Coaches sit nearby like soothing nursemaids, but they can’t help once a serve is struck. Only the player can pepper, prod, keep his temper, choose. Taylor Fritz’s knees aren’t great, so Nishesh Basavareddy feeds him drop shots. Mercy is uninvited.

There’s time to think, but mostly it’s instinct, all those accumulated hours of footwork polished, videos reviewed, matches played, now resulting in split-second responses without a conscious thought. When he was coaching Simona Halep, Darren Cahill told me, “I want her to be more automatic – to see the ball, know exactly what to do, execute.” But like dust inside a robot, small things get in the way.

The heat interferes, so does the wind and uncertain bounce. “It’s not easy to play aggressive all the time,” says Rublev, but he can’t slow down, can’t hit short, can’t allow his rival space and time. “If the ball doesn’t go,” says Daniil Medvedev, who loses early, “I don’t have the power to make it go.”

The rally is a collision of ideas, mishits, desperation, flukes, it is an assembly of brain-fades, inspiration, bullying, escapes. No tennis arena feels bigger than Court Philippe-Chatrier, 32 feet available behind the baseline, which is the area Rafael Nadal used to patrol, launching forehands that Devvarman says “had much more heaviness because it travelled 20 per cent more distance”.

Players get pulled six feet wide of the sideline, then scramble for precious position, one moment commanding a rally, then abruptly defending, activating some ancient survival mechanism which is best described in one word: Run. Djokovic, finally, could not. In his prime, the Serb was a slithering, stubborn scholar on shot-making, but now his legs betray him. “I ran out of gas,” he says.

In every way, he cannot rally.