At Roland Garros,
Dog of life. A year of waiting, two long weeks of tournament to wait and one last sleepless night to stampede at the idea of attending the match of the year, in the semi-finals of Roland, between Carlos Alcaraz, the young prodigy and number 1 in the world, and Novak Djokovic, the wise old man looking for his 23rd grand slam. All this for what ? So that crap of muscle fibers invisible to the naked eye come and reduce everything to nothing under the pretext that… Under the pretext that what, huh, by the way?
After two sets of crazy intensity, the first for “Nole” (6-3), the second for “Carlitos” (7-5), the Murcian began to feel pain in his right leg, cramps left us it seemed, at the start of the third inning. Obliged to involve the doc’ and to take a medical time out outside the allotted time, the Spaniard was sanctioned of a game lost for free, which was not at all to the taste of the public, on the verge of taking out the white handkerchiefs to claim the head of the referee.
Alcaraz refuses to give up
Compassionate (for the moment), Djokovic even crossed the court to come and inquire about the health of his opponent. Seeing his marked face, we quickly understood that it smelled of Landes pine. The physio massage will change nothing, or very little. On his return to the court, the Spaniard struggled to just trot and let go point by point. The break at the end of the third set, conceded 6-1, and a trip to the locker room for treatment, will again have little impact. The body is no longer there, the head is in keeping.
As a good badass that he is, Alcaraz will refuse to give up – despite multiple invitations from his coach Juan-Carlos Ferrero to drop the case – but, on the court, it’s just the same. 31 minutes of play later, Djoko will put an end to this parody of opposition, not without having put the public on their backs (for a change) after having repeatedly clenched his fist in rage on unforced errors by his opponent in the fourth set. Class… On arrival, what was shaping up to be one of the biggest meetings of the year will have been pschitt. Blame it on the damn physique of Carlos Alcaraz who did not withstand the shock. And this is unfortunately not the first time.