ROD LAVER ARENA — Novak Djokovic is now just two wins from a record 25th major title after he came from behind to beat Carlos Alcaraz 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4 at the Australian Open.
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.
It is the first time Djokovic has beaten at top-10 player at a grand slam since the 2023 US Open final, and sets up a semi-final against world No 2 Alexander Zverev on Friday.
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 MoreThe weather was far from ideal, the mercury dipping well below the 30 degrees that had characterised the previous four days of the Australian Open and a cool southern breeze blowing through Rod Laver Arena.
Djokovic 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.
The previous match between Aryna Sabalenka and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova had featured 11 breaks of serve, so perhaps it should have been no surprise that there were two in the first three games of this seismic men’s quarter-final. Alcaraz’s wayward forehands from the trickier northern end handed Djokovic his break before a fine Spanish backhand winner brought the set back on serve.
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.
Not that it had held him back. He dropped sets to wildcard Nishesh Basavareddy and qualifier Jaime Faria en route to the quarter-finals, but no one really ever imagined it meant more than a Djokovic struggling to go through the gears in the early stages of a tournament. We had seen it before.
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.
But he could hide it no more in the heat of battle against the sport’s hottest or second-hottest property (depending on your point of view). After going 5-4 down in the first set, Djokovic left the court with physios and received a medical timeout. He returned to court with heavy strapping on his left thigh and was visibly hampered as Alcaraz sealed the opening set.
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 MoreIt didn’t last – just like the first set, Alcaraz broke back almost immediately – but then a wounded Djokovic is a dangerous animal: he seems to be out on his feet and some points and then surges at others, seemingly at will. One such surge came at 4-5 and Alcaraz was powerless to resist it. Suddenly, the match was level and alive again.
Who 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.
But his tennis betrayed that there was pain, there was impediment. He was hitting two first serves at times, desperate for cheap points, and running to the net at every opportunity. It was the same gameplan as he executed in Cincinnati 18 months ago, when he beat Alcaraz on a sweltering hard court while battling heat exhaustion. And once again Alcaraz was struggling for a solution.
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.
Could Alcaraz wrestle back momentum? He could, saving a de facto match point at the end of a 33-shot rally on his own serve. Losing the point would have given Djokovic the chance to serve for the match at 5-2.
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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