The Serbian roared to the crowd at big moments late in the fourth, but said the close loss just \u201cwasn’t meant to be,\u201d before heaping further praise on the Spanish champion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe results are a testament to his already stellar career. I can’t think of any other superlatives about him,\u201d Djokovic said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe deserves every bit of the praise that he gets from his peers, but also the whole tennis community.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe’s a very nice young man. Good values, nice family. Of course, already a legendary tennis player that already made a huge mark in the history books of tennis, I mean, with only 22 years of age.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a record 38th Grand Slam final, and with Margaret Court sitting on 24 major singles titles, Djokovic was looking to become the player with the most singles Grand Slam titles in history.<\/p>\n
His five-set semifinal victory over defending champion Jannik Sinner also put him on the precipice of becoming the first player to defeat the world No.1 and No.2 at the same major.<\/p>\n
The stakes were enormous and the stage matched the moment, as 22-time Grand Slam champion Rafael Nadal watched on beside another AO champion, Ken Rosewall. \u00a0<\/p>\n
At one point, as Alcaraz relentlessly defied logic, Djokovic shrugged towards Nadal \u2013 who he famously defeated in the longest major final of all time at Rod Laver Arena in 2012 \u2013 and yelled out, \u201cWant to play?\u201d Nadal smiled and laughed.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Serbian roared to the crowd at big moments late in the fourth, but said the close loss…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":456689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-456688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/456689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}