Jannik Sinner beat Novak Djokovic 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 in the Wimbledon semifinals on Day 12, ending the 39-year-old’s latest run at the tournament and pushing the world No. 1 into the final. The scoreline looked tidy. The work behind it was not.
Sinner won all 15 of his service games and forced Djokovic into constant pressure across 30 games, creating 13 break points while Djokovic made only one. Djokovic held 12 of his 15 service games, but that was not enough to keep the match level for long, and he was taken to deuce five times. Sinner, by contrast, was taken to deuce only twice, both in the same game. That difference is why the result felt more one-sided than the repeated 6-4 sets suggest.
Djokovic put it bluntly afterward. He said he was “just half a step late basically in any shot,” and that Sinner was “just a level or more better” than him. He added that he was “not sharp enough, not reactive enough, not balanced enough to play him.” For a player with 24 Grand Slam titles, the loss also fit a larger pattern this year: he said he has reached one final and one semifinal in three Slams, a return most players would welcome, but not one he rates highly enough for himself.
That is the contradiction at the heart of Djokovic’s season. At 39, he is still reaching the latter rounds of Grand Slam events, but he is no longer controlling them the way he once did. He said that for 99 percent of players, the year would count as a very good Grand Slam return, yet for him it falls short because he is used to the highest level of results and achievements. The numbers from this semifinal backed up the feeling on court: the closer the score looked, the more Sinner separated himself in the exchanges that mattered.
The other semifinal also moved quickly, with Alexander Zverev beating Arthur Féry 7-6, 6-2, 6-4 after Féry, a former member of Westside Lawn Tennis Club and world No. 114, pushed him to a first-set tiebreak. For now, the focus shifts from Wimbledon to the U.S. Open, where the chase continues and Djokovic’s next test will be whether another deep Grand Slam run is still enough to satisfy him.
