As long as there's a pitch, there's a game!

I'm of course talking about a match between these two players whose qualities are amplified on grass ;).

On Djoko's side: experience, craftiness, managing the low phases, the serve, fighting spirit...

On Félix's side: explosiveness, forward-thinking play, his athleticism (if you can call it that), his forehand as a key shot...

On the other hand: Djoko still struggles to really make the difference from the baseline, and he has definitely aged. He now has to rely on guile pretty much everywhere, and a lot of his matches come down to very little (Wu, Rinderknech, Safiullin, just to mention this tournament). As for Félix, there’s still that “choker” side to him, made worse on the backhand wing, and that, in my opinion, inability to get rid of the tension in the big moments. That’s the main glass ceiling for a Canadian who, as he himself says, hasn’t improved in quite a few years and remains stuck at a certain level, admittedly already very high.

The Serb’s experience is therefore going to be even more important here to drag the Canadian into those tense moments and pin him on the backhand side. We can count on him to perfectly execute a well-thought-out strategy in a match that’s within his reach for a quarterfinal of the Grand Slam where he now has the best chance of winning. There’s a small chance Félix lets go and goes into “come on man, if you lose to Novak at Wim, there are worse things” mode, but I think that chance is small because it’s too much in his nature for me, and he hasn’t made changes that are impactful enough to pull himself out of that.