NOVAK DJOKOVIC seems to delight in punishing Andy Murray for daring to question his dominance. Retribution for the Scot winning Wimbledon in 2013 came in the form of eight successive defeats and it looks like the Serb is demanding similar recompense after being beaten in the Montreal Masters final.
Djokovic’s 6-1 6-3 annihilation of Murray to reach today’s Shanghai Rolex Masters final was his most resounding win over the Scot since losing just one game in Miami eight and a half years ago. And the score illustrated the huge gap that currently exists between the world’s top two players.
Djokovic, inset, appears totally invincible. Last week he won the China Open title in Beijing for the fourth year in succession and it will take a brave man to speculate that he won’t follow up with a third Shanghai title in four years against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga today.
Murray seemed at a loss to explain how he can look so inferior to an opponent that he is supposed to threaten more than anyone else in the game. “I wouldn’t say I felt desperate out there, but it was a very tough match from my side of the court,” he said. He paid the price for coming up with a sub-standard serve in the opening stages.
Five breaks of serve from Murray’s first six attempts with the ball in his hands, every one of them including break points, resulted from a combination of poor delivery and all-out aggression from Djokovic on return.
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“I made it extremely difficult for myself because I served poorly,” said Murray, who struck six double faults, managed to get fewer than half of his first serves into play and won the point with just one of 13 attempts with his second serve in the
opening set.
“You can’t afford to do that against Novak with the way he’s playing just now, the amount of confidence he has in his game. You have got to do better than that. The serve is obviously the one shot that you control out there. I hope it was just one of those days.”
What made things all the more perplexing for Murray was that he played one of his best matches to embarrass fifth-ranked Tomas Berdych just 24 hours earlier.
Clearly the psychological threat posed by the sight of Djokovic across the net is something that Murray needs to work on.
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Djokovic goes into today’s final against 15th-ranked Tsonga having won 36 of his last 37 matches in the People’s Republic, the only setback coming last year in the title match against Roger Federer.
The 28-year-old has now won 20 consecutive sets and possesses almost twice the ranking points of second-placed Murray.
Last week’s title in Beijing made him the first player in the history of the sport to earn more than $15m in prize money in one year and Djokovic said: “It was my best match of the tournament at the right time against a player who was in form and one of my biggest rivals, a player I lost to a couple of months ago in a Montreal final.
“However I’m not surprised how I managed to dominate. I’ve played Andy in so many of these particular matches in my life that I know exactly what I need to do. I know the game plan and it worked tonight.”
Tsonga characteristically played some acrobatic tennis to halt Rafael Nadal’s resurgence, diving across the court to secure match point in his 6-4 0-6 7-5 win despite missing the first 11 weeks of the year with an arm injury.
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Although he has not faced Djokovic since August of last year, he won their most recent meeting in Toronto.
“I will play against a very, very good player and I know it’s going to be difficult,” said the Frenchman.