Revolutions in sport always come with warnings. There is no exact date to a dethroning, only the inevitability of it. Great players can see the young coming and it's like looking at old photographs of themselves. Pimples and eagerness, scrawny bodies and ambition. All that rage, respect and no mercy.
Young players make older players better and then they make them extinct. They praise their elders but want to hand them pension cheques. They have too many runner-up plates at home and cringe at the 2,456th asking of the same question: "What makes Novak, Rafa, Roger so good?" In the phrase, the Next Star, they want the first word erased.
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