Australian produced his best in the first set of the Wimbledon men’s final but was ground down by an inscrutable opponent
Nick, you will be back. Hmm. Will he, though? There was the sense of a slightly awkward set of wedding speeches about the ceremonials at the end of this men’s Wimbledon singles final, a four-set victory for Novak Djokovic that seemed, for all the quality of the tennis, to be oddly inevitable from about 50 minutes in.
This was, of course, a Djokovic story once again but then men’s tennis has basically been a Djokovic story for the last 10 years. Here the lineal world No 1 was utterly clinical, his levels vertiginously high, riding out a sublime first set when Nick Kyrgios seemed to be playing in clean, crisp perfect sunlight, then reeling in his man via a ruthless fourth-set tie‑break.