Djokovic’s Problem With Italian Players

The country of Italy is dethroning Novak Djokovic from the top of the game. It started in the Davis Cup. Djokovic just came off from winning the US Open and the World Tour Finals. Then he plays Sinner, has match points, has a look for a backhand passing shot on match point, doesn't convert it, and loses that match. Serbia ends up losing to Italy in the semis. Then he goes off to the Australian Open, loses to Sinner, doesn't play until Indian Wells, and now he loses again to an Italian player, Luca Nardi.

The fact that Djokovic lost to Nardi, who is Italian, is just a coincidence, but I do think the Davis Cup did have a huge effect on Sinner, of course, but it also had a little bit of an effect on Djokovic. Djokovic recently made a community post from an interview where he was asked what tennis taught him, and he said that one of the most valuable lessons is to be able to shake losses off and look for that next opportunity that can come in the next tournament.

Bad Start

So while I do think this is true for Novak, it doesn't matter that he lost his second match in Indian Wells. He's going to have a chance to redeem himself on the clay. What I do think is that tennis is a game that's based on confidence, and that great year of 2023 ended on a sour note. In fact, Novak did say himself that this one is going to stink a bit when he was talking about his Davis Cup loss.

So this is not something that Novak is used to. He usually plays extremely well in the beginning of the season, and now he's got a bunch of losses. He lost to de Minuar at the United Cup, he lost to Sinner at the Australian Open, and now he lost to Nardi at Indian Wells. So it's super important for Djokovic to get a good result in those clay court tournaments starting in Monte Carlo.

Italian Tennis

Because Nardi is Italian, I want to take this opportunity to talk about Italian tennis, which is absolutely exploding. There were a lot of great female players from Italy over the last 15 years or so: Francesca Schiavone, Grand Slam champion, Flavia Pennetta, Grand Slam champion, Roberta Vinci, who was a phenomenal player, Camila Giorgi, Sara Errani. Currently, the top four are Paolini, Bonetti, Trevisan, and Cocciaretto.

Hence, Italy has had a lot of success on the female side, but on the men's side, it was definitely less. Now, there are so many young Italian male players going up in the rankings, you could have a situation where you have four or five of them in the top 30 in the world. The interesting thing here is if you look at the ages of some of these guys. Sinner is 22 years old, Musetti is 22 years old, Arnaldi is 23 years old, Cabolli is 21 years old, Nardi is 20 years old. What often happens is that when you have a lot of good juniors growing up together and you have one guy who explodes up the rankings, which is Sinner, it gives the other guys belief that they can make it as well.

Another possible reason why Italy is turning into a powerhouse, apart from the Sinner effect, is that it's a great country for tennis in general. Number one, the coaching is phenomenal. Southern European coaching is good, whether we're talking about Italy or Spain, and also the infrastructure is phenomenal. Italy has a tremendous amount of tournaments, whether we're talking about Futures, Challengers, ATP tournaments, WTA tournaments. Players in that country can play a tremendous amount of tennis in the country and don't have the need to travel when they're building their careers.

Djokovic’s Loss

Sometimes when Djokovic loses to lower-ranked players, it's really weird. It doesn't look like he's tanking, but he's very flat emotionally. I've seen this numerous times with Djokovic, I've even seen it last year, especially in that clay court stretch prior to the French Open.

That was not the case in yesterday's match. Djokovic was not mentally flat, he was fighting really hard to win this match. Now, he did not play well, he made a lot more errors than he normally does, and he made a lot of errors on the backhand side. He was out of position a lot on his backhand. When I looked at some of those backhand mistakes, especially in slow motion, it didn't look like he was set up correctly to the ball, he was reaching forward a little bit, he was reaching to the side a little bit, and was making errors. Unfortunately, that's the complexity of tennis, we don't know why it was the case.

On the other hand, Nardi was playing spectacular tennis. Just like many of the other young guys that are coming up, Nardi is a very complete power player. He can hit tremendously hard from the back of the court, serves well, and most importantly, moves well. Nardi took advantage of some uncharacteristic unforced errors from Djokovic in the first set, broke him, and won that set comfortably.

Then Djokovic started playing a lot better, broke early in the second, and then we had a super long game at 2-0 in the second set that Djokovic ended up losing with a very controversial break point. We're going to get to that later. Despite that, Djokovic did end up winning the second set, and I was ready to turn the match off because what normally happens when Djokovic loses the first, wins the second, he wins the third very easily. However, that did not happen yesterday.

Games were on serve, and then at 3-2, Nardi played an unbelievable return game to break Djokovic's serve, blasting groundstroke winners. So both players ended up holding serve until 5-3 in the third, and I thought that maybe here Nardi is going to get a little bit tight. But no, he played an exceptional service game and won 6-3 in the third. It also turns out that Nardi is a huge Djokovic fan and had a Djokovic poster in his room when he was growing up.

Controversial Point

When these guys met at the net, there was an exchange, and it had to do with that 2-0 Djokovic breakpoint Nardi hadin the second set. Djokovic hit a second serve and Nardi was getting ready to hit a forehand return, but he thought the serve was out and he kind of stopped playing, waiting for the call to happen. It didn't happen, and then he hit the ball back with very low intensity. Anyways, Djokovic was in the half-court, he could have put the ball away, but he actually stopped playing, hit a really bad drop shot. Nardi ran it down, slid into it, and hit a cross-court winner. Djokovic didn't even try to get it because he stopped playing. Then Djokovic complained to the umpire that Nardi stopped playing the point, he was looking for a hindrance call.

Djokovic was 100% in the wrong because that is not a hindrance. A hindrance would be if Nardi put up his finger or said out. In theory, Nardi can play the point any type of way he wants, with low intensity or high intensity, and pretend it's over or not over, it doesn't matter.

When they shook hands, Djokovic said something to Nardi. Now, I interpreted this as Djokovic apologizing for that situation early in the second set, but a lot of people interpreted this as Djokovic scolding Nardi for what he did early in the second set. I don't think that this is what happened just based on their interaction. I couldn't hear what Djokovic said, I think he was speaking Italian, but it looked to me like Djokovic was rather apologizing for what happened early in the second set and not scolding Nardi for what he did early in the second set.

Final Thoughts

The crazy thing about tennis is how good players are between 100 and 200 in the world. When you look at these guys, they look exactly the same as the guys that are ranked top 100. It's going to be very difficult to see a difference in the way they're playing. And in fact, Nardi was playing Challengers prior to Indian Wells, and during the Encore interview with Nardi, they were saying that he just lost to a guy ranked 400.

The level of the guys between 100 and 200 in the world is sky-high, and the fact that a young guy like this, ranked 123 in the world, comes and beats Djokovic is wild. Remember that he had lost in the qualies in Indian Wells before beating Djokovic just shows you the depth of tennis, the quality of tennis. It shows how good these guys ranked between the top 100 and 200 are.