Last week in Monte Carlo, last year’s best player and this year’s best player did not reach the level they had become accustomed to to finish a tournament.
Still, chances are, when the inevitable disappointment of defeat wore off, Novak Djokovic and Jannik Sinner were feeling pretty good about the start of their 2024 clay-court seasons and feeling pretty confident about the direction they could take.
For Djokovic, it’s another week without a title, and he still hasn’t won one with a quarter of this season now over. Not that strange. Unless you are Djokovic.
For Sinner, it was only his second defeat in a season in which he has 25 victories, and another frustrating experience on clay, a surface on which he should excel but is not – at least not yet.
The progress was as clear as the eye could see for Sinner – except for the linesman’s eye which likely cost him his semi-final against Stefanos Tsitsipas on Saturday.
At the start of the deciding third set, Sinner had every reason to believe he was headed to the final.
Tsitsipas served, trailing 1-3, and with his opponent one point away from grabbing a second break on the Greek’s serve. Sinner appeared to have that point in hand when Tsitsipas’ second serve was inches long, but the call never came.
Tsitsipas won this match, the next three and the match.
A day later, he won the title by beating Norwegian Casper Ruud 6-1, 6-4. He said the missed call probably cost Sinner their meeting; Sinner said he couldn’t stop thinking about it after it happened, even blaming it for the cramps he felt later.
“A tough question to swallow,” Sinner said. “I was playing, at times, excellent tennis – you know, I was playing well.”
Electronic calling will be in effect at all ATP tournaments next year.
Sinner was indeed playing well, according to some of the most sophisticated statistics collected by British tennis data company TennisViz. The Italian, in fact, was playing as well as anyone in Monte Carlo.
One way to measure this is “conversion score” – the percentage of points a player wins when in an attacking position. It’s a sign of a player’s clinical nature, his ability to seize opportunities and convert them into real points. On average, an ATP Tour player will win 66% of these points.
In Monte Carlo last week, Sinner achieved an industry-leading conversion score of 73 percent, and nearly three percentage points ahead of its closest competitor. Ruud, who he would have faced in the final, had a conversion rate of 70.3 percent.
“He will probably win the tournament if this double fault is called,” said Tom Corrie, head of performance at TennisViz.
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Jannik Sinner, the former Italian skier with big serves who dethroned Novak Djokovic
Sinner has already won three tournaments this year, including her first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open. He reached the semi-finals of two others. His dedication to going at his own pace is paying off like never before, even though he’s long been the tour’s ultimate “trust the process” player.
So no, he didn’t walk away with another title in Monte Carlo, but he climbed from fourth to second in just three months, won his first Grand Slam and overtook Carlos Alcaraz – who seemed on a different level just a year ago — in the rankings. The Italian reached the semi-finals of this tournament last year, but then couldn’t get past the quarter-finals in any of the other three clay-court tournaments he participated in; he lost in the second round of Roland Garros.
That was before his serve and forehand became some of the most effective shots in the match.
All of this goes a long way to explaining his philosophical approach to his defeat on Saturday, when he spoke of the sudden change in momentum as a “fun part of tennis.”
“Everyone can make mistakes, unfortunately or fortunately,” he said. “I can make mistakes.”
It’s true, he just doesn’t do a lot of it, and neither does Djokovic, especially in recent years.
But while Djokovic fell on hard times before winning a Grand Slam almost every time he was able to play one, it often happened at this time of year, at the start of the clay-court season.
Djokovic on clay is all about feel and timing, and the mission is to find both by the time he arrives in Paris for Roland-Garros. Although he has long been probably the best clay-court player in the world not named Rafael Nadal, winning three French Open titles during the toughest period to win one, with Nadal monopolizing 14, his switching to red and dust generally does not. is going very well.
Three years ago he lost his second match in Monte Carlo against Briton Dan Evans, a good player, but not really an all-time great. Two years ago, he lost his first match there against Spaniard Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, losing the third and decisive 6-1. Once again: a good player, but no Roger Federer. Last year, Italian Lorenzo Musetti beat Djokovic to reach only his second Masters quarter-final.
Musetti could one day become a big star. But he isn’t now and wasn’t then.
All Djokovic has done in two of those three years is win the 2021 and 2023 French Open, the only annual clay-court tournament he really cares about. He lost to Nadal, in a Parisian quarter-final of incredible intensity, in 2022.
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Late last month, Djokovic parted ways with his longtime coach, Goran Ivanisevic, who had been with him since 2019. The move came just over a week after Djokovic lost to the Italian Luca Nardi, ranked 123rd. they performed in Indian Wells, California.
He flew largely solo in Monte Carlo and, for the first time in his career, plans to play without a coach. Combine that with his fragile history in this principality bordered by southern France and Djokovic looked primed to be upset, until he didn’t – at all.
He won his first three matches convincingly and lost the fourth in three sets to Ruud, one of the best in the world on clay. Although he admitted to having some “ups and downs” in this one, there was a sharpness to those first three wins that perhaps caught many of his peers off guard.
Is he happy to have zero titles for the year here in mid-April? Of course not. Djokovic has high standards for himself. But at this point in his career, he really only cares about winning Grand Slams and, especially this year, winning an Olympic medal, because he’s never done that.
The Olympic tournament will take place in Paris at the end of July, back on the clay court of Roland Garros. Until then, his top priority is finding a balance between playing enough tournaments to be sharp when the big tournaments come, but not so many that he’s exhausted after what will likely be a deep run at the next two Bigs. Slams.
We don’t know, for example, if he will play in Madrid, the next big clay court tournament. The conditions there are not at all similar to those in Monte Carlo. The surface is generally considered faster, and a little altitude in the Spanish capital makes the ball fly. The rest could come in even more handy as he approaches his 37th birthday on May 22.
Through that prism, given how well he appeared in Monte Carlo, a semi-final loss to Ruud isn’t a bad result at all.
“I can build from here, because, you know, I played good tennis,” he said on Saturday. “I hope that in the next tournaments I can play even better.”
It looked like he knew he would.
(Top photo: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)