One aspect of living in Australia that I miss is a slightly surprising one... there are some good sports journalists plying their craft and I'd forgotten about it until I tripped over a comment about the cricket from one of them, Greg Baum. Here he is on the winner of the mens' Australian Open final, Jannik Sinner...
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/tennis/ ... 5f0ke.html
At Kooyong three weeks ago, Jannik Sinner said that this would be for him a hunting year. “We go into every tournament and we try our best,” he said, “and we see what we can catch.”
On Rod Laver Arena on Sunday night, he bagged the biggest game of all, clambering back from two sets down to beat Daniil Medvedev in five and so claim the first of what all expect to be many major championships. At 22, he’s the youngest Australian Open winner since Novak Djokovic won the first of his 10 in 2008.
Added to the scalp of the beast that was Djokovic in his lair in a semi-final, that’s quite a collection he will be lugging back to the south Tyrol. The Davis Cup already sits in his cabinet there.
The title might change his life, but it won’t change him. Impassive and expressionless throughout the tournament and the final, he was still contained when it was won. He lay on the court for a moment, hugged Medvedev, communed with his box and ran his fingers through his mop of red hair. Lean, sinewy and light on his feet, he looked like a hunter and his heart beat as slowly as one. And here were we, thinking he was Italian.
Medvedev had spent the tournament, if not exactly scrambling through the undergrowth on all fours, at least always on the run. He is a survivor, a wily old-ish bird. He’s played and won three previous five-setters in this tournament, two from two sets down.
He’d lost sets and recovered them the way some people do with car keys. When he led by two sets on Sunday, he looked to have somehow become the one that got away. But more than 24 hours out in the open became like 24 hours on the run. He’d had more court time than Donald Trump.
He looks like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and deals in sagas, but they don’t often have happy endings. Heartbreakingly, this was the second time he had lost an Australian Open final from two sets up, having succumbed to Rafael Nadal that way in 2022.
It leaves him with one title from six major finals; he is beginning to compile an Andy Murray-like CV. That said, Djokovic won only one of a stretch of six finals in the middle of his prolific career. Then they flowed like rakia. Major finals have their own micro-environment.
Of course, it’s pixelating to portray Medvedev merely as an animal. Tennis has had few smarter players – and sometimes smart alec – and it showed this night. Everyone, doubtlessly including Sinner, expected a version of his patent defensive game. Instead, he played him from inside the court. He read Sinner like a tea leaf, while his own game was as opaque as a tea bag. He’s a bit of a scruff, but so was Einstein.
Medvedev gave Sinner a comprehensive runaround for the first two sets, and was about to become for Sinner the one that got away. It wasn’t that Sinner had the jitters – no hunter can afford those – but that Medvedev was a shot and a thought ahead of him all the time.
Medvedev was beating Sinner at his game as well as his own. Having lost his serve just twice previously for the tournament, Sinner was broken four times in the first two sets. The stalker became the stalked. The last thing a hunter needs is an ambush.
It’s masterful to adapt your game to each new opponent as they come at this stage of the tournament, confounding all expectations. We’re not talking about backcourt mugs at the other end.
But Medvedev had run a marathon and as he began to fatigue, Sinner began to make the rallies longer, then win them. There is an evenness about his game that reflects his temperament, and it should serve him well for a long time. Winners emerged in Sinner’s game, errors crept into Medvedev’s. Sinner’s breaks were timely, one each at the end of the third and fourth sets were enough. Simply, he picked off his target.
Before the fifth, Medvedev incurred a time violation warning after a flying visit to the change room. It was to no avail. He was a spent man and Sinner was a grinner.
Jannik Sinner makes sure Daniil Medvedev sees him bouncing on his toes as the Russian gets back from his bathroom break.
Whether this is the start of the post-Djokovic era or merely a hiatus, it was at least a foretaste of the future, and tasty at that. In the penumbra of a superstar’s reign, sometimes significant developments are obscured.
Sinner has won his last two matches against each of Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz, Stefanos Tsitsipas and his last four now against Medvedev, and as the new season began was the form player in the world. But he had not previously been to the final of a major, which is a different world. Now it’s his oyster.
Medvedev had been there, and toted in all that experience. He also had been somewhat overlooked. He was the only player to win more matches overall last year than Sinner. As Sinner had spent the off-season sharpening himself up physically, Medvedev had put time into his psychological make-up, redirecting his mental energies from the wasted outlet of confrontations with other players and antagonistic fans and into his own craft.
For the most part, it worked. Besides, he wasn’t Djokovic, which is not to slight Djokovic and his prodigious achievements here, but to welcome a new face. He’d trained hard to rid it of a previous smirk. It’s been a project, but Medvedev has won over the Melbourne crowd. It’s hard to turn your back on a player who is at once so clever and so resilient, and in this agonising moment so gracious.
But Sinner is the new model: unfussed in manner, poised beyond his years, graceful in victory or defeat, and one hell of a tennis player. It would be silly to say of a man from the south Tyrol that his horizon is as wide the oceans. But it’s true to say that there’s plenty more quarry where he comes from and plenty of time, too. This is the start of a collection.
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