Rafael Nadal explores the realm of impossibilities during win over Novak Djokovic

One of the most mysterious things about sports, and about humanity in general, has to be the seemingly superhuman strength that players acquire when pushed to the absolute limit of their endurance. You can talk all you want about slower courts, advanced racquet technology or even improved fitness levels among the pros, but when a match goes deep into a 5th set and each player continues chasing down every shot with an enthusiasm that borders on the maniacal, you run out of explanations.

The fact that it seems to happen so often these days – nearly every Slam produces at least a couple such epics – makes it even more belief-defying. Tommy Robredo manufactured not one, not two, but three such inexplicably long-drawn displays of stamina at this year’s French Open; Stanislas Wawrinka and Richard Gasquet produced their own exhibition of nerveless shot-making deep into their 4th round encounter; and yesterday, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic did – there’s no better way to say this – an encore of their 2012 Australian Open final. Fittingly, the last of these epics (no disrespect to David Ferrer here, but it’s hard to see him push Nadal to 5 sets in the final) was the most dramatic of them all, even if it wasn’t the most high quality affair (that title remains with the Wawrinka-Gasquet match).

It’s a little strange to see how every notable rivalry in the world of sports sooner or later morphs into something much more than a mere contest of skill or stamina. Nadal vs Djokovic started out as a pure battle of spin vs power, but after all these years it has also turned into a battle of of aggression vs steadiness, of surface superiority vs career legacy, of high-flying confidence vs unyielding patience, of self-belief vs passion, of mind vs heart. That’s what we like to think, anyway. Do the two players themselves think of their rivalry in such larger-than-life terms?

For vast stretches of yesterday’s match, it seemed like every one of those elements was actually playing on the players’ minds. For the second year running, Djokovic, he of the self-proclaimed career Slam ambitions, seemed to let the occasion get to him, as his normally-reliable backhand leaked errors all over the place at the start. The moment Nadal went up by a set and a break though, Djokovic summoned all of his self-belief and played a couple of flawless return games to even the match at one set all. That, naturally, was followed by a near-flawless set by Nadal, whose forehand, specially the down-the-line variant, kept gaining in confidence with each passing minute. For all the feverish anticipation that had preceded the match, the match seemed to be proceeding along obstinately predictable lines up to that point. Add the fact that the two refused, or were unable, to play their best tennis at the same time, and the ‘epic’ quotient of the match was correspondingly non-existent.

Then Nadal went up a break in the fourth set, and that was all that was needed to make the contest come alive. Normally, going up by a break with two sets already in the bag is a sign that the match is about to be put to bed, but when Djokovic is on the other side of the set, ‘normal’ is the last thing on anyone’s mind. He broke immediately with a flurry of razor-sharp returns, and the rallies now acquired a whole new level of pace and intensity. Although Djokovic was broken once more at 5-5 to give Nadal the chance to serve for the match, he was in enough of a groove to take the match to a tiebreaker, which he won in surprisingly straightforward fashion.

Nadal’s shoulders seemed to slump as he immediately lost his serve to start the fifth set, and Djokovic was happy to capitalize. He went after his shots, specially the forehand, to keep the Spaniard on the defensive, and continued exerting immense pressure through his return. Still, the set went with serve until Djokovic served for a 5-3 lead, when of course, the Serb committed that fatal technical error. He had already saved a couple of break points in the game (one through an inexplicable sitter forehand miss by Nadal), and despite being in control of the point at the third deuce, he seemed anxious to put the ball out of Nadal’s reach. In his bid to pluck the ball out of the air, he went too close to the net for an overhead and ultimately lost his balance, crashing into the tape before the ball had bounced twice on the other side of the net, a ball that Nadal had little chance of getting back into play. It’s easy to look back at this as the turning point of the match, but the sheer absurdity of both Djokovic’s clumsy overhead and his subsequent me-against-the-world body language was enough to convince everyone watching at the time that it was, indeed, the moment when everything was about to change.

And change it did, as Nadal broke to get back on level terms, and held serve easily the rest of the way. The sting on his forehand seemed to sharpen before our very eyes, and by the end he was producing winners off it at will. Even his backhand acquired a new level of potency in the crosscourt exchanges, with a couple of them leaving Djokovic shaking his head in wonder. And while all of this was happening, the Serb seemed to get more frustrated with each passing game; if it wasn’t Nadal’s unreal defense that was giving him fits, then it was the court surface, about which he constantly complained to the umpire as the set went into overtime. Djokovic later claimed that he felt the court was too ‘dry and slippery’ towards the end and wanted the umpire to get it watered, but his pleas repeatedly fell on deaf ears.

Was Djokovic making an excuse for his loss? He didn’t directly attribute the result to the slipperiness of the court, but it’s never been considered classy to complain about the conditions after you’ve lost a match. Maybe he was legitimately hampered by the conditions, or maybe he wasn’t; in any case, though, it’s hard to imagine Nadal giving up the match after that critical game at 4-3. Serving behind in the final set was always going to be a tough assignment for the Serb, specially as his vulnerabilities of old (spinny first serve, frustration at being unable to end a point, etc.) seemed to have come to the fore at exactly the same time that Nadal had found his most turbo-charged defense and most penetrating forehands.

At the end of the 2012 Australian Open final, I felt that the match should have been won by Djokovic in 4 sets. Yesterday, I felt the same way about Nadal. He was the better player throughout, and if he hadn’t made a couple of regulation backhand errors towards the end of the 4th set, the match wouldn’t even have been one to remember, let alone a five-setter. Djokovic refused to give up until he had traded blows with the King of Clay for close to five hours, but he was also a trifle lucky to have been in a position to win the match. Ultimately, it all seems to come down to that point with Djokovic serving at 4-3, but even that is a little misleading – Djokovic only got back to deuce in that game through a very uncharacteristic forehand error by Nadal on break point.

It’s tempting to call Djokovic’s brush with the net as much of a fortuitous game-changer as Nadal’s missed backhand pass when he was serving at 4-2 in the fifth set of the Australian Open final, but we should know by now that a single point can never be big enough to determine the result of the entire match. Tennis is a sport that can turn on a dime, but in the long run, it is invariably the deserving player that comes up trumps. There was nothing lucky about the way in which Nadal kept producing one blistering forehand winner after another towards the end of the match, or about the way he kept returning almost every single bullet groundstroke that Djokovic hammered, groundstrokes that would have been winners against any other player on the planet, in any era.

In the end, the match did give tennis watchers everything that they had waited and hoped for; maybe not throughout the 4 hours and 37 minutes that it spanned, but definitely in that spectacular 82-minute long fifth set. Nadal’s explosive retrieving as the match wore on was every bit as jaw-dropping as anything that we’ve seen from him at any point in his career, and Djokovic’s accuracy with his baseline blasts was no less impressive. There was an air of the supernatural, of divinity, to the match as it went into overtime; just like we did during Melbourne 2012, we had to rub our eyes in disbelief and ask ourselves: how can they stand, let alone sprint for miles on end, after all that time on the court? How was it even possible to have such limitless reserves of energy?

We may never know the answer to that. What we do know, however, is that Djokovic will have to wait a while before his career Slam dreams can materialize, because Nadal is not going to give up his clay throne without exhausting the last ounce of energy that he can summon from his body. And that may conceivably never happen, judging by the way he was flying all across the court right up to the last game of the match yesterday.

Beating Rafael Nadal at the French Open may not be impossible, but it might just be the most difficult thing to do in the world.