Djokovic received treatment for an apparent groin injury during the first set, which he lost, but won the next three in a high-quality clash with the No 3 seed.
Alcaraz meanwhile has now lost in the quarter-finals in Melbourne two years in a row, and will have to wait another 12 months to attempt to complete the career grand slam of winning all four majors.
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Read MoreDjokovic has always asked to play in the evening in Melbourne to avoid the worst of the heat, so he would have been glad of the change, but the wind that came with it would have been most unwelcome.
It already felt as though the match was on Alcaraz’s racket and that Djokovic would live or die by how his opponent played. It was most un-Djokovic, for the most part, but it has been a feature of his play at this tournament, where he has occasionally been too tactically passive.
But there had been a few signs. During a pre-tournament hit, Djokovic seemed to hide away in the corner of the court with his physio to attend to some tape in the hip area, and he had trained outdoors on off days much less than normal. They were tiny signs but perhaps clues that he was managing an issue he did not want anyone, not least Alcaraz, to know about.
Movement compromised, Djokovic started swinging for the hills, initially finding them. Consecutive return winners and a tight forehand miss from Alcaraz, who all of a sudden found himself facing an opponent with a whole different way of playing, and Djokvic had a lead.
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Read MoreWho knows what was really going on inside Djokovic’s leg – or mind. Was he playing with Alcaraz’s mind? Or were the anti-inflammatories just kicking in? The truth probably lay somewhere between the two. Djokovic has often played through the pain in matches – he famously win the 2023 Australian Open with a three-centimetre tear in his hamstring – but he rarely suffers in silence. A man who wears his heart on his sleeve, it is not in his nature to do so. It is one of the things that makes him so watchable.
He was barely able to hold serve without saving at least one break point, while on return he was resolutely committed to a new strategy of returning serve from as close to the baseline as possible. It led to three breaks in a row in the heart of the third set, two of them in Djokovic’s favour and for the first time his finger was to his ear, his eyes gazed high into the rafters and he was starting to conduct the crowd, his crowd.
But it was delaying the inevitable. He did make Djokovic serve it out without the insurance of a double-break, and but he could not stop the Serb winning. Some things never change.
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