2024-04-09 17:15:30
Novak Djokovic is still world number one, but at the moment he is not considered the best player in the world. Jannik Sinner’s statistics this year take his breath away as well. The young Italian has the ideal conditions to complete a monumental tennis coup in the clay part of the season.
Even thanks to the big lead from last season, during which he won three out of four Grand Slam tournaments, Djokovic passed another milestone.
At the age of 36 years and 321 days, he became the oldest tennis player in the position of world number one. He erased Roger Federer’s record from the charts.
He is already spending a total of 420 weeks on the throne. It is a historical maximum that seems unattainable in the future. The previous record of the German Steffi Graf was 377 weeks, and the Serb broke it already last February.
But now, tennis experts and Djokovic himself feel that a coup is approaching at breakneck speed.
The tennis revolution is led by Sinner, a twenty-two-year-old boy from the Dolomites who has honed his game to near perfection in the past year. And this year is unbeatable.
The statistics of twenty-five matches and a single defeat scares all opponents, including the Belgrade giants.
“Jannik is currently the best player in the world. He has only lost one match. He has improved in all attributes of his game,” Djokovic said before the start of the clay part of the season in Monte Carlo.
“He moves better, he is much stronger mentally. We have seen a lot of difference in Jannik in the last six months in important matches. Moreover, he is winning the important matches. He has learned from his mistakes and is very concentrated in important moments,” he continued.
The huge progress that Sinner has made in the defensive game and the mental side even led some experts to claim that the Italian is going through a kind of “novakization”.
He is becoming a similarly complex and extremely hard-to-beat tennis player, as the intrepid Serb was for many years.
“We’ve all known for a long time that he can hit the ball hard from the forehand and backhand, that he likes to dictate the game and is aggressive. He is still like that, but with much fewer mistakes and more reserve. From a technical and tactical point of view, he has made huge progress and is playing incredible tennis,” added Djokovic.
In the rankings, Sinner loses 1015 points to the experienced Serb, but he has much better prospects on clay.
The Italian did not do well on the orange clay last year, so he defends only 585 points, while Djokovic has 2315 and world number three Carlos Alcaraz has 2265 points.
That alone makes Sinner the clear favorite to take over the world throne soon, despite clay being his weakest surface. However, the Italian’s overall progress suggests that he could also shine on it this year.
“Usually I struggled on clay, now it will show where I have moved. To succeed on it is my next goal. I am better prepared than ever before,” said the native of Innichen, a mountain village in northern Italy.
At Roland Garros a year ago, he was surprisingly eliminated in the second round after a five-set battle with the German Daniel Altmeier.
“The clay is hard work and I’m in a completely different shape than I was a year ago. That’s what we’ve focused on, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the gym and I’ll be a lot more relaxed now knowing I can play for hours and hours without my level going down ,” he analyzed his hopes.
Djokovic, whom he defeated three times in the last four mutual duels, can only meet in Monte Carlo in the eventual final.
The Serb started the Masters 1000 tournament with a commanding win on Tuesday, outclassing the Russian Roman Safiullin 6:1, 6:2 in the second round after a month-long break.
Sinner awaits the premiere on Wednesday, his opponent will be the American Sebastian Korda.