ADVANTAGE STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME TACTICS
IF YOU’RE SOMEONE who goes around believing that life is fair - or should be fair - are you labouring under a misapprehension? Or, more bluntly, are you naive? Answers: probably and maybe. I don’t know.
I do know this, though: you’re more inclined to think about these things after meeting Alex de Minaur, who at time of writing was ranked the 24th best tennis player in the world. Twenty-fourth. Impressive.
But such is the way many people view sport, 24 can make you an also-ran. It can make you a journeyman. For the record, de Minaur himself is dissatisfied with 24.
Does he deserve to be ranked higher? By the hard maths of the ATP rankings, no. You’re ranked what you’re ranked. But what about by other measures - measures you can see, feel and admire but not calculate? Yes. By these other, vaguer criteria, I believe de Minaur deserves better.
Before we go on, you need to know when this piece was written. It’s 24 January, the morning after de Minaur played Novak Djokovic in the fourth round of the Australian Open. In the media, there’d been a big and breathless build-up. De Minaur, the last local hope, was in form, and while Djokovic is Djokovic, there was meant to be something wrong with his left hamstring, so decent judges were giving the Australian, 23 at the time, a fighting chance.
But Djokovic didn’t just beat de Minaur,slaughter, surely even his world would have turned black. Not because he’d been trounced, but because Djokovic gave him a two-hour look at the unattainable. It felt like Djokovic, looking more than ever like a perfectly proportioned, imperious tennis maestro, performed at a level to which de Minaur (and just about everyone else for that matter) can only aspire.
