Djokovic out of Roland Garros: Fonseca stuns Paris

It was past ten in the evening when Court Philippe Chatrier began to change colour. The floodlights had been on for hours, the clay looked churned up like a battlefield after nearly five hours of play, and a young man who was not yet born when Djokovic played his first match in Paris stood at the net with his arms spread wide. Joao Fonseca, nineteen years old, had just done the kind of thing few people believe until they see it for themselves.

The Brazilian beat Novak Djokovic 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-5 in the third round of Roland Garros. He turned a two-set deficit into three sets won, knocking out one of the greatest players in history at the tournament where Djokovic has lifted the trophy so many times.

How did the match turn around?

The first two sets followed the script of the more experienced man. Djokovic led without any real panic, controlling the rallies and waiting for the errors of his young rival. Then came the thing that makes tennis so unpredictable: Fonseca began to play without fear. He broke in the third set, took it 6-3, and suddenly it no longer felt like the match was heading in one direction.

The figure of 4 hours and 53 minutes shows how hard it was. The fourth and fifth sets both finished 7-5, which means Djokovic had his chances in each to extend or settle the contest, only to run into a shot he had no answer for every time. The Serb himself admitted afterwards what had broken him.

“He was finding incredible shots, lines, it was simply unreal from his side,” Djokovic said of his opponent.

What does this result mean for Fonseca?

What lifts Fonseca’s win out of the category of fluke is the statistic that goes with it. He is the first teenager in the last thirty years to come back from two sets down at a Grand Slam in two consecutive matches. That is not luck, it is the kind of character rarely seen at this level in a player his age.

Brazil has waited a very long time for a player like this. Since Gustavo Kuerten, the man who won this very tournament three times, the country has not produced a tennis player of world class. Fonseca is now halfway to changing that, and the next test arrives quickly: in the last 16 he meets Norway’s Casper Ruud, a player with two Roland Garros finals on his record and far more experience on clay.

For Djokovic, this is another farewell to Paris without a trophy, and a question of how many more chances remain. For Fonseca, it may be the first paragraph of a story that is only just being written.

Is Fonseca the next big name in tennis, or was this a one-off sensation?