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Novak Djokovic reunites with an old coach and rediscovers his game

(On Tennis)

It was late March, and all were in favor of Novak Djokovic shaking free of his tennis crisis and returning to the fore. All were in favor of Vajda agreeing to return as Djokovic’s coach after being dismissed less than a year earlier.

“Frankly, they all said that they have a desire to see Novak back again; they said they didn’t see him for a long time on TV,” Vajda said with a booming laugh.

Vajda was speaking in the main Roland Garros players lounge on Sunday after Djokovic had reached the French Open quarterfinals with a 6-3, 6-4, 6-2 victory over Fernando Verdasco of Spain that was not quite as routine as it reads (the first three games alone required 29 minutes).

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Djokovic, the 31-year-old Serb who dominated the sport as recently as 2016, is still quite a few big victories from rescaling the summit. He arrived at this French Open seeded 20th, his worst seeding at a Grand Slam tournament since 2006.

But there is now a sweep to his serving motion and a sting to his groundstrokes that is reassuring even if it is far from incontrovertible evidence that he is ready to dethrone Rafael Nadal again in Paris.

“Slowly, it is coming back,” Vajda said. “Still not there fully, definitely, so I don’t think I should favor him in this tournament, like to win it or something.”

Yet there is cause for renewed optimism for Djokovic, which was hardly the case in March as he crashed out of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells and the Miami Open without winning a round.

It seems no coincidence that his run to the semifinals at the Italian Open and return to the quarterfinals at Roland Garros are happening with Vajda back on his team.

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Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams’ longtime coach, pointed to the recent results of Djokovic and Maria Sharapova as evidence that coaching is too often underestimated. Sharapova, who will face Williams on Monday in the fourth round, recently reunited with former coach Thomas Hogstedt, the hard-driving Swede who once helped her return to No. 1 after shoulder surgery.

“She’s back to a very good level, and I like it because whether it’s her or Djokovic, it shows the coaches have such an important role,” Mouratoglou said. “They took back the coaches who at some point helped them do good results and they find their level back.”

Djokovic and Vajda have a deep personal connection more akin to family than employer and employee. And it surely pained Djokovic to cut ties with Vajda and the rest of the core members of his support team in May last year as he searched for ways to pull out of his tailspin.

But new coaches Andre Agassi and Radek Stepanek have now left, and the band that generated so many hits, including 12 Grand Slam singles titles, is gradually reuniting. Austrian fitness coach Gebhard Phil-Gritsch is also back in the fold, although longtime physiotherapist Miljan Amanovic is still working with Canadian player Milos Raonic. Former co-coach Boris Becker, who was part of the team in 2014, 2015 and 2016, is in Paris but as an analyst for Eurosport.

A Grand Slam quarterfinal would once have been as routine for Djokovic as sliding into his two-handed backhand, but not at this stage.

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“Rome was the best tournament I have played so far this year, and now Roland Garros is probably even better,” Djokovic said. “I have been many, many times in the quarters of Roland Garros, and all the Slams, and of course I do appreciate it, considering it’s a different kind of situation for me. But I don’t want to stop here.”

It is unlikely that he will have to. He has had a dreamy draw at this French Open, and his quarterfinal opponent will be the unseeded Italian surprise Marco Cecchinato, a 25-year-old ranked 72nd in the world who defeated a visibly weary David Goffin, the No. 8 seed, 7-5, 4-6, 6-0, 6-3 on Sunday.

Cecchinato, a frequent training partner for Djokovic at his base in Monte Carlo, was banned by the Italian Tennis Federation for 18 months in 2016 for match-fixing. The ban was then reduced to 12 months by an independent tribunal and fully overturned later in 2016 by the Italian Olympic Committee.

Cecchinato, who returned to the tour in 2017, declined to discuss that situation after his victory over Goffin. He is certainly no favorite against a resurgent Djokovic. The bigger test would come in the semifinals, where Djokovic would face the winner of the new-wave duel between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem, the two best clay-court players this season not named Nadal.

Thiem beat Nadal in Madrid before losing to Zverev in the final. Zverev then pushed Nadal to three sets in the Italian Open final and arrived in Paris as the No. 2 seed.

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But Zverev, a powerful 21-year-old with a complete game, had never reached a Grand Slam quarterfinal until now. To do it, he has had to win three straight five-set matches, rallying from two sets to one down in all of them and defeating Karen Khachanov, 4-6, 7-6 (4), 2-6, 6-3, 6-3, on Sunday.

It is one thing to be told repeatedly that you have the potential to go deep in a Grand Slam; it’s quite another to actually go out and prove it in best-of-five-set matches under more intense scrutiny than in regular tour events.

“It takes time to achieve your full potential, so to say, gamewise, mentally,” Djokovic said. “It takes time to really understand the difference of being a part of the Grand Slam compared to other tournaments, because it is different.”

Djokovic missed last year’s U.S. Open because of a long-term right elbow problem. He then arrived at this year’s Australian Open with a compression sleeve on his right arm and an abbreviated service motion designed to reduce the load on the elbow. He lost in straight sets to Hyeon Chung in the fourth round and underwent elbow surgery soon after.

He has now reverted to a fuller service action, although the racket head still does not dip as low as it once did.

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Vajda said he was no fan of the abbreviated motion that Djokovic used in Australia. After he agreed to rejoin the team, Vajda said Djokovic, while on vacation in the Dominican Republic, sent him 10 videos of the serve.

The videos were useful because Vajda had watched little tennis during his time away from the tour, preferring to focus on family and refresh his perspective with other activities. Before deciding to return, he consulted his wife and two daughters. Hence the family vote.

“His motion, there was a lot of good things but also some things I didn’t like biomechanically,” Vajda said, adding that the motion Djokovic is using in Roland Garros allows him to hit kick serves more effectively.

Most important, he said, Djokovic was feeling no pain and tennis is truly a top priority.

“I told him he’s not going to be 100 percent, and he’s still not 100 percent,” Vajda said. “He’s maybe 80 percent of his potential, but he’s working constantly, continuously for two months already.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

CHRISTOPHER CLAREY © 2018 The New York Times

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