They don’t come much bigger than this. Not in terms of hype, hysteria or television ratings, but brutal, power tennis.
Ivo Karlovic, the 6ft 10in Croatian ranked 36 in the world, served his way to the fourth round, mincing and mashing the No 9 seed, and 2008 Australian Open runner up Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. On the day there was supposed to be thunder but wasn’t, Karlovic brought the rain. Welcome to the match where a rally was rarer than a Wimbledon without showers, Glastonbury without wellies.
It is well-known that Tsonga, the French No 2, has more than a passing resemblance to Muhammad Ali. Well, this was like watching two boxers forgo such preliminaries as blocking and dodging, and taking it in turns to bludgeon the other, with one rule: first person do drop loses. Tsonga hit the deck soonest. He lasted four sets, 2hrs 44min, but he had been stumbling around long before that. He even plonked himself on a line umpire’s chair at one point. It can’t have been exhaustion: there hadn’t been enough rallies for that. This was a punch-drunk player, simple as that.
And why wouldn’t he have been. Karlovic’s serve, always impressive, was unrelenting, unreadable, unbeatable. He didn’t drop a point on serve in the fourth set. Over the match, 77 per cent of his first serves went in, and of those he won 90 per cent. Sixty one per cent of his first serves were unreturnable. It is easy to get distracted by statistics, but those are staggering. The one area of disappointment is that the Croatian didn’t improve on his own 141mph serve record set this week. He had to settle for 139mph instead. “You cannot do nothing,” Tsonga surmised.
Like an Apache helicopter or piece of heavy artillery, Karlovic’s serve is a force multiplier. His ground stokes measured against the kind of players he competes with is Hersheys compared to Cadburys. But his serve means the total is vastly superior to the sum of his parts. Watching him coil his gangling limbs, then spring open in a split-second, or watching the serve speed reading as he ratchets it up through 120, 130, nudging 140, is a spectator sport in itself.
But it is not just the speed and direction that makes the serve multiply his abilities. It is the psychological effect that it has on his opponents. They know that every time they return a ball, they have to make it count. Tsonga couldn’t cope, and he wanted everyone to know it. Shrugging his shoulders and slowly plodding about the court, he knew that he had no chance of breaking but for a slice of luck. When guesswork is your only strategy – and judging by the number of times he went the wrong way, that is exactly what it was – fortune is your only friend.
But the howitzer’s continued to rain down uninterrupted. The first set buzzed by in a hail of lead, 7-6 Karlovic. Same in the second, but this time an awkward volley meant the Frenchman nudged it, again 7-6. Same story in the third, but this time Tsonga cracked. 7-5 Karlovic.
Whatever Tsonga could do, he did. Twenty-six aces off his racquet would have been ideal elsewhere, but it was 20 less than the beanpole across the net. There were so many heavy serves the line umpires should have been kitted out with Tommy tin helmets. Of course, they stuck to their traditional head-gear, and quite right: there is something so superbly British about confronting a thundering projectile of compressed rubber with nothing but a flimsy white farmer’s flat cap.
The match continued. The Frenchman forced a fourth set tie-breaker. Quelle surprise. He even went up a mini-break. But that serve is relentless. Tsonga was on the ropes, Karlovic delivered the hammer blow on his second match point: the final ace.
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