One of the best returners of serve, if not the best, in tennis history just couldn’t find the answers to win one of the\u00a0Frenchman’s service games. <\/p>\n
After not having a break point against Mpetshi Perricard’s massive delivery in the opening set – with a break by the home favourite at 5-5 helping him become the first French player to win a set against Djokovic in Paris in 14 years – Djokovic was zero-for-nine after nearly 12 completed games in the second set.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Emphasis on the nearly. After Mpetshi Perricard saved three set points at 5-6 with aces, he couldn’t see off a fourth. Djokovic returned the serve on that key point, and won a 17-shot rally to, finally, equal the scoreboard. <\/p>\n
He opened the point up with a delicate drop shot, and though the 6ft 7in Mpetshi Perricard raced forward admirably to retrieve it, he fired his forehand passing attempt just wide to lose the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the best returners of serve, if not the best, in tennis history just couldn’t find the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-691621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}