• Australia.Djokovic reacts to a great Thiem, wins his seventeenth major

Each of the big winners by Federer, Nadal or Djokovic forces us to reflect again on the close struggle that they maintain to finish their respective careers with the largest number of titles of this maximum rank. With his eighth title at the Australian Open, achieved after winning Dominic Thiem for 6-4, 4-6, 2-6, 6-3 and 6-4, in three hours and 59 minutes, the Serbian has risen to the 17 in the global, being only two of the Spanish and three of the Swiss.

Thiem did not go far from breaking the unalterable sequence since the 2016 US Open, when Stan Wawrinka took the title: the three men who fight in a kind of prolonged flight to occupy the best place in history have distributed the 13 last big.

"The Grand Slam are my main goal, so I continue to compete and play all season," said Djokovic, the only one who openly admits the weight of such ambition. Nole explained that he is looking for «historical number 1». The nuance is relevant after his new victory, together with the defeat of Nadal against Thiem in the quarterfinals, has risen again to the sky of the ranking: 9,720 points compared to 9,395 in Spanish.

The victory was, thus, a full recognition for the tennis player who usually starts the season more fit. This year the stretch hit by Djokovic has a plus, after leading Serbia towards the victory in the ATP Cup with the qualified success of defeating Nadal, which does not beat him on the fast surface since the end of the 2013 US Open.

The Balkan counts his 13 matches by victories in 2020, after becoming the first professional tennis player to win majors in three different decades. Ken Rosewall had done it before, in the fifties, sixties and seventies of the last century.

The suffered triumph against Thiem, who did not take advantage of a break ball in the third game of the fourth set when he dominated by two sets to one and felt the proximity of the greatest success of his career in the fourth game of the fifth, where he gave the serve, shakes again the candidacy of the also pentacampeón of Wimbledon, three times winner of the US Open and one of Roland Garros to occupy the place that Federer still maintains, which he surpassed in the semifinals in Melbourne.

Very capable in any scenario

The recently concluded tournament illuminated the first possibility that Nadal matched Federer's 20 greats, but it was Djokovic, as tradition dictates, who has gained meters in the race. The trend increases their options to pass in front of their two opponents, as theirs have been five of the last seven Grand Slam titles. At 32, six and a half years younger than Federer and almost a year younger than Nadal, Belgrade is a capable competitor on any surface.

It has, however, impassable mental gaps in struggles of this caliber. It happened this Sunday, when he suffered a warning from the chair judge, Damien Dumusois, for exceeding the 25 seconds stipulated to take off, followed by a penalty that forced him to start directly from the second serve with 4-4 in the second set. He lost the service and the game, faced the judge and fell into a gap from which he did not return until the fourth quarter. «After losing the second set I started to feel very bad. I do not understand the reason, because I have prepared the game and I have done the same as in the others. The doctor said I wasn't getting enough hydration, ”he said to complement the explanation of what happened.

Much had to do in the construction of an extraordinary tennis match Dominic Thiem, who, at 26, takes advantage over the members of the so-called Next Gen to claim as an alternative. Since February 2019, when he began working with Nicolás Massú, he has experienced an explicit growth in fast track, but he was not expected as the co-star of the tournament. Winner in Indian Wells of his first Masters 1000 and champion in the second part of last year in Vienna and Beijing, Thiem has exhibited in Australia a game full of order and determination, with perfectly homologable ways away from the clay.

If in his first two Grand Slam finals he met Rafael Nadal, and 12 times champion of Roland Garros and the best specialist ever appeared on that surface, in the third he faced who might be considered the strongest man in The hard track story. As it has been written, this time Thiem was closer to being able to take the big hit in his career.

While movements in the second line begin to be noticed, with the precedent of Daniil Medvedev facing Nadal in the last final of the US Open, Djokovic's triumph maintains the established power. Federer may have a last option to win Wimbledon for the ninth time, but the fight will resume before, starting May 20, at Roland Garros, with Nadal again as a favorite, not forgetting Nole and Dominic Thiem.

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