Diego Schwartzman had been toiling under the burning Parisian sun for a minute shy of two and a half hours when it happened. The Argentine had given everything against Rafael Nadal. He had chased, harried and hustled; he had stood toe-to-toe with the champion, traded mammoth back-court blows, pummelled Nadal’s backhand.
He had even taken a set, the first conceded by the Spaniard at Roland Garros in 37 attempts. None of it was enough. Three games into the fourth set, he had salvaged just one point. And so Schwartzman hammered his racket into the ground, and proceeded to play the next point with a broken frame. You know what happened next.
This is what Nadal does to his opponents on Court Philippe Chatrier. He sees their excellence and raises them perfection. The last time he found himself trailing by two sets to one in Paris was against John Isner a decade ago. With Schwartzman leading 4-3 in the third set, another collector’s item seemed to be looming. The Argentine had won 11 points in a row on serve and was pushing the champion hard in every rally. Nadal did not lose another game, sealing a place in his 14th French Open semi-final 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 6-0.
“It’s normal to lose a set, no?” said Nadal. “I’m playing against the best players of the world and I don’t expect to come here and to win every match in straight sets. It happened a couple of times in my tennis career, but it’s nothing that I expect. I expect always tough battles, and today against a very tough opponent. The good thing is that at the end of the third set and in the fourth set I think I played a very high level of tennis.”
That is what Novak Djokovic will have to overcome on Friday, when he faces Nadal in the 58th instalment of their storied rivalry. The Serb leads that particular battle 29-28, but it is a clay-court war he must survive if he is to become the first man in the open era to win every major twice. Djokovic, who subdued the ninth seed Matteo Berrettini 6-3, 6-2, 6-7 (5-7), 7-5, knows this all too well. The world No 1 was humbled by Nadal in last year’s final, suffering the rare indignity of conceding a love set, and was similarly powerless in the final set of their meeting in the Rome Masters final last month.
One thing Djokovic will not lack is motivation. In an extraordinary final game against Berrettini, he screamed and kicked a courtside advertising board after missing a match point. When he finally got the job done a couple of points later, he responded with a wide-eyed, chest-thumping outburst of emotion that called to mind his wild celebrations after winning the 2012 Australian Open. Clearly he is not done with this tournament just yet.
A more immediate concern for the top seed is that he has spent more time on court in his last two matches, against the Italians Lorenzo Musetti and Berrettini, than he did in his first three combined. Physical fatigue is unlikely to be a factor, but the effect of two unexpectedly close matches on his mental sharpness and self-belief is harder to gauge. Either he has played himself into top form or he will have cause to rue the uncharacteristic errors that gifted Berrettini the third-set tiebreak.
Djokovic said afterwards that it had been difficult to deal with the departure of the raucous 5,000-strong crowd, who had to be ushered out at 11pm to comply with the new curfew regime in Paris. It was an awkward moment for the players, who had to leave the court for a quarter of an hour before completing the match in the soulless silence that has come to define the night sessions.
For two sets, Berrettini struggled to make an impression against Djokovic, who held his serve throughout and nullified the 6ft 5in Italian’s thunderous serves with some inspired returning. The Italian came to life in the third set, however, and as he harnessed the energy of the increasingly partisan crowd, Djokovic momentarily faltered. The Serb recovered his equilibrium in the fourth set, but only after taking a heavy tumble on the baseline, just as he had done against Musetti in the previous round.
“This match had it all: falls, crowd, break,” said Djokovic. “It was a lot of intensity. I just felt under tension the entire time. It was just super, super stressful to constantly be under pressure on my service games, because his service games were quite smooth with the big serve.
“The reaction in the end was just me liberating that tension that was building up for the entire match.”