Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz’s generational Tennis rivalry and a Australian Open fever dream

MELBOURNE, Australia — It was supposed to be another classic. The Australian Open men’s singles match everybody had circled. The curtain-raiser for the 2025 Tennis season. The latest chapter of the generational duel between the greatest player of this era and the next one.

It ended up being a journey into tennis weirdness, as Novak Djokovic limped one-legged into Carlos Alcaraz’s brain and scrambled it from the inside, making the 21-year-old play through so many versions of himself it was impossible to count them.

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

After eight games of the sort of tennis the world has come to expect from these two stars, Djokovic sprinted to a drop shot and lunged to get the ball back, coming up just short. He squatted for a few extra moments, a tell-tale grimace coming over a face that has been fit for a poker table. He’d done something to his left leg. He went to his bench to towel off, then limped back to the baseline.

Tonight of all nights, his 37-year-old body had let him down again, just as it had at the French Open last year when he was winning on cruise control before he tore the meniscus in his right knee.

Djokovic couldn’t possibly know how that tiny tweak was going to wreak havoc with Alcaraz in a way that nothing else would. Or perhaps he could.

He did know what to do. He’s been here before; right here, on this 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, slug some painkillers and wait for them to work, then start climbing out of the hole. He’d done it, but against the likes of Taylor Fritz and Francisco Cerundolo; good tennis players, but not on the level of Alcaraz.

To do it against him would take something special and strange.

Something special and strange like Djokovic switching from a guy who showed up ready to grind all night to someone who was going to play first-strike tennis, sneaking up to the net or just closing his eyes and ripping at the lines; the kind of tennis Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have used to remodel the tennis court the past 12 months, changing the sport so much that players are having to evolve, or even fundamentally change, skills they have honed for years to compete.

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

In the game where Djokovic injured himself, Alcaraz retreated 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 frailness. When he got a second-serve look in the second set, he was back on the baseline again, rushing himself into hitting aggressive returns and failing to execute them.

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

Alcaraz thought he suddenly had to morph, too, from someone who builds his game around gunslinging to someone who had to prioritize moving Djokovic around the court. He couldn’t really do it, not for long stretches anyway — and he knew, on reflection, that he shouldn’t have tried to.

“It seems like it’s going to be easier, but you are thinking 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 cogs whirring.

“I felt 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 in his news conference.

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

Except, for all the tactical shifts and physical endurances, the special and the strange, it really wasn’t. It was pretty ugly for long stretches, especially in the third set when Djokovic was doing his best backboard impersonation as his movement returned and Alcaraz was melting into goo. He had no idea which version of Djokovic would be coming at him from one point to the next.

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

Rod Laver Arena too was flat, the crowd squirming around awkwardly, trying to figure out what to cheer for. All that played right into Djokovic’s hands, far more than having them rally 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 the point of no return.

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

It never happened.

Alcaraz raised his level, but Djokovic stayed calm and held serve twice to win and advance to a semifinal against Alexander Zverev.

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

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