Preview: Can Djokovic tame Thiem's power like he did in Madrid?
The Serb has played this tournament with the clear-eyed, cold-blooded determination of someone who knows this is his chance to make history.
Djokovic and Thiem have a history at Roland Garros, though it’s hard to know what, if anything, we can learn from it. In 2016, the Serb cleaned the Austrian’s clock with the loss of just seven games; in 2017, everything went the opposite way, as Thiem straight-setted a lackluster Djokovic, bageling him in the third set. More recently, and more relevantly, these two met in the Madrid semifinals last month, and a very calm and controlled Djokovic did exactly what he needed to do to tame Thiem’s power and edge him in two tiebreakers.
I could see something similar happening on Friday. Thiem is ready to win the French Open, and if he was in any other quartet of semifinalists, he might. But Djokovic has played this tournament with the clear-eyed, cold-blooded determination of someone who knows this is his chance to make history. When Alexander Zverev broke Djokovic in the first set of their quarterfinal, it didn’t spell doom for Djokovic, it spelled doom for Zverev instead. Put on alert, Djokovic hardly put another foot wrong all day. Thiem will bring a lot of firepower to this one, but I think Djokovic will do whatever it takes to find the answers to counter it. Winner: Djokovic
