Subdued Djokovic makes Australian Open final despite lacklustre display

Serb pushed to five sets by defending champ Wawrinka, will now meet Murray in the decider.

MELBOURNE: A solemn Novak Djokovic will look for positives from his previous clashes at Melbourne Park after playing arguably his worst match of the current Australian Open in edging a mentally ‘dead’ Stan Wawrinka in five sets yesterday.

The top-seeded Serb blew hot and cold in the 7-6(7/1), 3-6, 6-4, 4-6, 6-0 semi-final victory, squandering a winning position in the fourth set and being fortunate that the defending champion was also out-of-sorts on a cool and breezy night at Rod Laver Arena.

Djokovic will meet sixth seed Andy Murray in his fifth final at Melbourne Park but is unlikely to glean inspiration from a video review of the match against Wawrinka, who later described himself as “mentally completely dead” with “no battery”.

“I can say I’m glad, of course I’m happy and satisfied to go through,” Djokovic told reporters, devoid of his usual good humour. “I’m proud of the fighting spirit that I had. But the level of performance was not where I wanted it to be.

“I think I have much more positive things to reflect on in my game and then all the matches that I played so far in the tournament than the negative.

“I’m in the finals. At the end of the day, that’s why I’m here, to try to get far in the tournament.”

Djokovic will take some comfort from the fact that he has had Murray’s measure at the year’s first grand slam, beating him in the 2011 and 2013 finals.

Murray, who also lost to Roger Federer in the 2010 title-decider, will contest his fourth final in Melbourne after a brilliant demolition of hard-hitting Czech Tomas Berdych in the first semi-final on Thursday.

Sharapova out to end Serena’s dominance

Top seed Serena Williams’ coach has dismissed the American’s decade-long, 15-0 winning streak against Maria Sharapova as irrelevant ahead of the arch-rivals’ blockbuster Australian Open final today.

The Russian’s overall losing record against Serena is 16-2, including a crushing straight sets win in the 2007 Australian final, and her last 15 meetings with the 18-time Grand Slam champion have ended in defeat.

But Serena’s coach, Frenchman Patrick Mouratoglou, said such statistics would mean nothing when the adversaries face each other in the Rod Laver Arena, describing Sharapova as a champion in her own right with five majors to her name.

“Every sequence has to end, just ask Nadal,” he said, referring to Czech Tomas Berdych’s quarter-final victory over Rafael Nadal this week to end a record-equalling 17-match losing streak against the Spanish great.

“Sharapova is changing all the time. This is someone who works hard. She develops her game, she evolves. This is the strength of a champion. Nadal did it all the time, and Serena does it too.”

Published in The Express Tribune, January 31^st, 2015.

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