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

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.