Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz’s generational tennis rivalry and an Australian Open fever dream

MELBOURNE, Australia — It was going to be another classic. Australian Open men’s singles match that everyone had been circling. The curtain raiser for the 2025 tennis season. The latest chapter in the generational duel between the greatest player of this era and the next.

It ended up being a trip into tennis oddities when Novak Djokovic limped one-legged into Carlos Alcaraz’s brain and warped it from the inside, causing the 21-year-old to play through so many versions of himself that it was impossible to count them.

This was already a tennis rivalry of the mind. Djokovic and Alcaraz, magnetic showmen and staples of tennis highlights, enter a state of total focus when they play each other. It’s the only way they can beat each other. The challenge, as much mental as it is physical, can send both into paroxysms if they’re not careful. From Tuesday night to Wednesday morning here at Rod Laver Arena, both their bodies and brains were sucked into a fever dream.

After eight games of the kind of tennis the world has come to expect from these two stars, Djokovic sprinted for a drop shot and lunged to retrieve the ball, coming up just short. He squatted down for a few extra moments, a telltale grimace coming over a face fit for a poker table. He had done that something to his left leg. He went to his bench to undress, then limped back to the baseline.

Tonight of all nights, his 37-year-old body had failed him again, just as it did at the French Open last year when he won on cruise control before tearing the meniscus in his right knee.

Djokovic couldn’t possibly have known how that little tweak would wreak havoc on Alcaraz in a way that nothing else would. Or maybe he could.

He knew what he had to do. He has been here before; right here, in the same court; with muscle tears and strains and the need to find a way out of the mess.

Slow down. Wait for the break. Get some treatment, take some pain meds and wait for them to work, then start climbing out of the hole. He had done it, but against the likes of Taylor Fritz and Francisco Cerundolo; good tennis players, but not at the level of Alcaraz.

To do that to him would take something special and strange.

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Something special and strange like Djokovic going from a guy who showed up ready to grind all night to someone who had to play first-strike tennis, sneak up to the net or just close his eyes and rip the lines; the kind of tennis that Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have used to reshape the tennis court over the past 12 months, changing the sport so much that players have to develop, or even fundamentally change, skills they’ve honed for years in order to compete.

Djokovic had used the first set for Alcaraz’s offensive turn, playing conservatively as the Spaniard hit all the winners and dictated the match.

In the match where Djokovic injured himself, Alcaraz retired from his second serve return position smack on the baseline. He stood back, set up the rally with a deep ball and then punished his opponent’s frailty. When he got a second-serve look in the second set, he was back on the baseline again, rushing in to hit aggressive returns and failing to execute them.

In contrast, Djokovic was alive. As soon as he sensed a drop in Alcaraz’s intensity, a “hesitation” as he put it, he pounced. Instead of just surviving through these moments, he thrived, actually winning the set he usually has to lose in these situations and raising even when he should have been further behind.

Alcaraz thought he would suddenly also have to transform from someone who builds his game around gunslinging to someone who should prioritize moving Djokovic around the court. He couldn’t really do it, not for long anyway – and on reflection he knew he shouldn’t have tried.

“It looks like it’s getting easier, but you think in your mind not to make mistakes,” Alcaraz said after it was over.

“I didn’t push him in the second set,” he also said.

Djokovic could see the gears whirring.

“I felt like he was looking at me more than he was looking at himself. I tried to hold my serve and put pressure on him,” he said at his press conference.

Djokovic even said that this encounter, which lasted three hours and 37 minutes and ended 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4, was: “one of the most epic matches I’ve ever played in this court – in any court”.

Apart from all the tactical shifts and physical endurances, the special and the odd, it really wasn’t. It was pretty ugly for long stretches, especially in the third set when Djokovic did his best imitation of the backboard as his movement returned and Alcaraz was merging. He had no idea what version of Djokovic would come at him from one point to the next.

Tennis players don’t. They pick a strategy and stick with it until it doesn’t work. When that happens, they switch to something else for a while. They don’t change 180 degrees every game, much less every point. Except when they do. Or rather, except when Djokovic decides that’s all he can do.

Rod Laver Arena was also flat, the crowd squirming awkwardly trying to figure out what to cheer for. All of that played right into Djokovic’s hands, far more than rallying them to his cause. Best to keep Alcaraz, whose game thrives on vibes and electricity, struggling not to doze off.

Perhaps the strangest moment came with Alcaraz 2-4 and break point down in the fourth set, on point of no return.

After a 33-shot rally, both players were bent over at the side of the court, the crowd on their feet and Alcaraz laughing, having kept himself in the game. It had the potential to be the defining moment of the contest, the point that turned what had been a disorienting, tentative flurry into the classic match it had promised to be.

It never happened.

Alcaraz raised his level but Djokovic remained calm and held serve twice to win and advance to a semi-final against Alexander Zverev.

Thirty-three shots lost to the oddity of a night that promised to be special.

(Top photo: Patrick Hamilton / SIPA via Associated Press)