Novak Djokovic close to perfection as he wins seventh Australian Open title

Novak Djokovic is the best tennis player in the world: now, and for the foreseeable future, perhaps until he chooses to retire, which looks to be a few years away yet, he hinted on Sunday night. What the 31-year-old Serb can achieve in the remaining days of a career that began more than a thousand matches and 72 titles ago is difficult to gauge but less so than it was before the final of the Australian Open.

What he did to Rafael Nadal in the Rod Laver Arena turned what had been a keen debating point about their relative merits, along with speculation about Roger Federer’s longevity, into a confident assertion that Djokovic has moved into another area of excellence.

As Pat Cash, working in Melbourne for Eurosport, said: “I’ve run into a few tennis players today and they’ve all said they’ve never seen a tennis ball hit like that in their lives. Novak can do that. It was absolutely mind-blowing tennis.” His colleague and former champion Mats Wilander described Djokovic’s performance as “absolute perfection”.

If Nadal could not stay with Djokovic for more than a few scattered moments of a final that lasted only two hours and four minutes, winning eight games and failing to take a point off his serve 56 times in 69 attempts, there is little chance for anyone else to inconvenience a player who has won three majors in a row and this year may even do the calendar grand slam for the first time since Rod Laver in 1969.

Nadal took his licks honestly. “It was unbelievable the way that he played, no doubt about that,” he said. “I didn’t suffer much during both weeks. But, five months without competing, having that big challenge in front of me, I needed something else. I don’t have it yet, to compete at this super high level. It would have been difficult to beat him even if I was at 100%. When a player does almost everything better than you, you can’t complain.”

It was, curiously, a towering anticlimax of a final. It was not just that the world No 1 destroyed the world No 2 in every department. It was that this was supposed to be a high point, a grand conclusion to a fascinating tournament, one in which John McEnroe prematurely announced, “a changing of the guard”.

There were few secrets between the finalists. It should have been much tighter than this. Only Fred Perry and Ellsworth Vines knew each other better on a tennis court than do Djokovic and Nadal; they played 162 times in the late 30s, barnstorming around the United States, the UK, Caribbean and South America in high-grade exhibition matches, with the American winning 88-74.

All of which makes the DjokovicNadal series of 53 matches seem tame – until you look closely at the intensity of their exchanges, as well as the length and importance of the occasions. This was their 15th best-of-five contest, taking in all the biggest cathedrals of the sport, the most memorable of which, famously, was the final in Melbourne in 2012, which lasted longer than any other decider of a major in history, five hours and 53 minutes.

Nadal was the first to “arrive”, winning his first major at the sixth attempt, 14 years ago – so he was slamsavvy when they first clashed in 2006, and dominated Djokovic pretty much until 2011, winning 16 of their first 25 matches. The second half of their story swings the other way, however. Nadal has beaten Djokovic only three times in 16 meetings since the second of his US Open final victories over him in 2013. It looks as if the only place he can stop him is Roland Garros, and even that is not the good bet it once was. If Djokovic were to beat Nadal to win the French Open, there would not be a T-shirt to house the Serb’s pride.

As for winning on the clay of Paris, Djokovic said: “The ultimate challenge is to win there against Nadal. Then you have [Dominic] Thiem and [Alexander] Zverev, Roger [Federer] is probably going to play. You have a lot of great players that on clay can challenge me or anybody else.”

Djokovic says the hunger has not left him. “The tennis court is a place where I’m naked, where I’m exposed to both extremes in terms of emotions and character. That’s where I have the opportunity to learn about myself. The hunger is always there.”