At Roland Garros,
Small linguistic and cultural subtlety. Depending on whether you are an Anglophone or Francophone athlete, it is more or less good to be compared to a goat. In French, it’s a rather bad sign. Example: “Paris was knocked out again in the 8th round of the Champions League, what a bunch of goats! / OM were knocked out by Annecy in the Coupe de France, it’s really goats”. In English, being the goat is the ultimate consecration. The acronym GOAT (Greatest of All Time) is an honorary title that only enthusiasts can bestow on a particular athlete. Example: “Messi won the World Cup, he is the GOAT and not Ronaldo”.
In tennis, the battle has been raging for several years between supporters of Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal to know who has goat status. The number of Grand Slam titles should be enough to measure tennis talent, but bad faith does not help, each camp always has an excuse to minimize the exploits of the rivals. In the event of a victory (very likely) over Casper Ruud on Sunday, in the Roland-Garros final, the Serb will become, at least temporarily, number 1 in a ranking where the Swiss can no longer advance and the Spaniard not much (at least literally and figuratively). But it is not impossible that your Federerist and Nadalist friends persist in challenging Nole’s hegemony. 20 minutes therefore teaches you how to defend the Djoker at the local PMU.
“His game is boring”
Answer : No, his game is effective and of formidable precision. We saw it again against Carlos Alcaraz, especially in the first set, tactically it was perfect. Even he says so. “The quality of my game today [vendredi] was really at a very high level, it was my best match of the tournament”. So yes, he rarely tries to drop shots and his baseline game is mainly defensive, but we can’t remain insensitive to his Martian passing shots on balls that are unplayable for ordinary mortals. Not to mention that no one returns as well as him. And then for a boring guy, he will have played the main roles in quite a few epic battles (2012 Australian Open final against Rafael Nadal, 2019 Wimbledon half against Federer to name the two biggest).
“He has more GC tournaments than Nadal because he has been injured less”
Answer : Novak Djokovic has also been hampered by injuries in his career. It is partly because of this that he was less precocious than the Spaniard. In particular in the elbow, a problem which comes back chronically and which affected him a lot during the clay court season before Roland-Garros. In 2017, he ended his season in July, missed the US Open and a match against France in the Davis Cup because of that. But he was less injured than Rafa, yes. The credit goes to him. Being regular is not (just) luck. “I am in perpetual search to perfect my body, to improve my performance, to increase the capacities of my body, to be faster, more enduring, more dynamic, more flexible, more agile and that is why I have even more results, he said in an interview with The Team. This is the approach I have had for over twenty years. »
“He has problematic opinions and is clearly antivax”
Answer : Flee this debate that you have no chance of winning and choose humor. “He had to put a handicap on himself. Without that, he would already be at 24 or 25 wins. “Something like that.
“Rafael Nadal’s hegemony at Roland-Garros is the sport’s greatest achievement”
Answer : It is indisputable. But let’s not forget the six Masters victories, the Masters 1000 record won by Novak (38) and the absolute record for the number of weeks spent as world number 1 ahead of Steffi Graff. But since we are talking about Nadal, what about the man who twice beat the unbeatable on his favorite ground? And above all, can the same be said of the Spaniard? Not sure. At the Australian Open – which Nole has won ten times, not badly either – the Serb leads two wins to zero. And the last one, in 2019, was not a pretty sight. Nadal, who had not lost a single set so far, was destroyed in three sets. Finally, last argument. Djokovic has 11 victories against Nadal on clay when the latter has only 10 on hard. One more point for the Serb.
“Gneugneu, Federer and Nadal are nicer, Djoko gets whistled”
Answer : If you get to this point in the discussion, you are about to win. There are only two things left to answer. 1) That’s not the point. 2) Friday again, he was booed by the Chatrier public without it moving him more than that. ” Does not matter to me. This is not the first time nor the last that I will be booed. I wait and I keep winning. We will even go further by recalling that his haters remain his greatest driving force. Adversity is his hobby. The supporters of Federer and Nadal would undoubtedly have gained from hating him a little less strongly.