Tired Novak Djokovic fights, but time and Carlos Alcaraz are too much for him

MELBOURNE – Cold wind and sweaty emotion mingle as two men hurtle through pressure and hustle past pain on a Melbourne night. Struggle is the poetic heart of sport. Grey clouds mournfully scatter the skies, for only one player will make it into history. Novak Djokovic is one set all and 2-4 down and serving 15-0 in the third set and he’s tired but trying to throw every shot, idea, tactic, angle and fury he owns at Carlos Alcaraz in the Australian Open final.

Eight shots, Djokovic hits. Eight of everything he has. Forehands blistered cross-court. Backhands zinged down the line. Even a volley. But everything he hurls, Alcaraz has a reply to. Finally, the Spaniard athletically slides to scoop a forehand over the net and the crowd springs to its collective feet in roaring incredulity.

They’re applauding Alcaraz and yet understand what is happening. Djokovic might be the GOAT, The Gladiator Of Awesome Tenacity, but they know what he is fighting against: an unusually gifted young man, calendars, history, scepticism, all those things he loves to scrap against. Overcoming has always been Djokovic’s anthem. He is tennis’ Achilles, its ultimate warrior but with an evident athletic weakness. His age.

Youth, unbridled and fast, eventually can’t be resisted. Djokovic, 38, had subdued Jannik Sinner (24) but Alcaraz is a 22-year-old with a forehand which whistles like a right hook. As the Spaniard seized momentum, the Serb appeared to understand that like time itself the match was irretrievable. The greatest of all time reluctantly bent to the greatest of this time.

Alcaraz

won 2-6, 6-2, 6-3, 7-5 in a final of tweeners

, drop shots, flicks round the net and 68 winners. Since 1877, when Wimbledon first began and Grand Slam counting commenced, only eight men before had completed the career Slam, this conquering of the surfaces of Melbourne, Paris, London and New York. These are tennis’ elite explorers, a list so exclusive that Pete Sampras does not sit on it. Yet Alcaraz is now the youngest to head it.

“Historic,” said Djokovic and he should know, for he made the Spaniard earn it. The Serb lost but he started as if in a trance, schooling the Spaniard with strokes from an ancient Serbian textbook: heavy, persistent, precise, purposeful.

His first-serve percentage was 78, his wide serve wicked, his unforced errors were four to Alcaraz’s nine, and as he took the first set a Serbian journalist beside me clenched his fist quietly. Alcaraz, whose face was stiff with tension, muttered as if he was in an exam whose questions he doesn’t understand.

Yet the Spaniard, now the youngest in the Open era to win seven Grand Slam titles, started to find a groove just as Djokovic’s slide rule started to misbehave. Suddenly the Serb looked imprecise (four unforced errors in the first set, 11 and 14 in the next two) and as Alcaraz took the second set the night was looking too long for the Serb. Later he would say his energy went “from north to south”.

Finals are tests of tennis IQ, yet this was also a battle of the bodies. Forehands mattered but also petrol tanks. After depleting five-set fisticuffs in their semis, these men resembled mountain climbers, rising into a thin air of suffering which is beyond our average imagination.

If sport is merciless then it’s also moving, for these men were dragging themselves past tension and exhaustion towards some version of athletic immortality. Djokovic has 10 mentions on the Open trophy and by night’s end Alcaraz’s name would find its first engraving on the same silver. Names never to be erased.

Eventually in every category, first-serve percentage, returns, drop shots, winners, Alcaraz edged ahead. Eventually he did to Djokovic what the Serb has done to the planet forever: Just wore him down. Just had one shot more. Just athletically suffocated him.

A 25th Slam for Djokovic feels harder as time keeps bullying him, yet we remain wary of doubting an athlete who has made us reconsider everything we hold true about bodies, talent, ruggedness and resolve. He still believes, yet says “I lowered my expectations last couple of years, which I think allows me to let go of some of that unnecessary additional stress”.

Djokovic has never needed anyone but on this Sunday he had the crowd, who offered him something beyond respect. Love perhaps? They chanted “Novak, Novak, Novak”, even at the ceremony, drawn to this once imperious champion who has now become underdog. Sport is the grandest equaliser.

This is what all great champions confront, the truth of vulnerability, and it’s how they react which defines them. In the fourth set Djokovic suddenly found a second wind, but one stat speaks loudest of his spirit: Of the 36 rallies which lasted nine shots or more, he won 19 to Alcaraz’s 17. His body was beaten, his tank empty, his rival inspired, but he was doing what the poet Dylan Thomas demanded. Just raging against the dying of the light and scrapping against the ghosts of time.