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| *Becker |
DEFENDING Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic lost spectacularly last night, and apparently it's all one man's fault.
We're not talking about Stan Wawrinka, or even about the
Djoker himself. Those two guys are irrelevant, because Novak's fans have isolated
the real reason behind his excruciatingly close defeat.
The man in their sights is Boris Becker.
If you're from the generation which gave us brats like
Justin Bieber, Bernard Tomic and this writer, you may not be familiar with
Boris. A former world number one and six-time grand slam winner, he was
consistently one of the world's best tennis players throughout the eighties and
nineties. He even won Wimbledon when he was just 17.
He also got into a bit of trouble off the court, which
brings us to the present day.
Novak Djokovic hired Boris to be his coach in December. He
was sitting just off court last night in Novak's box, alongside three ominous
looking gentlemen in jackets who were rather unkindly labelled "the
Serbian Mafia" by some viewers.
It didn't help that one of the "men in black" got
up from his seat to remonstrate with a member of the crowd halfway through the
match.
Anyway, back to Boris. The excellent player turned
incessantly standing coach (seriously, how often did the guy get on his feet in
that fifth set?) is copping a lot of flak for the disastrous result.
Granted, it was his first official tournament as Novak's
coach, but if Boris were a football manager he'd have been sacked as soon as
Wawrinka won the second set.
Yahoo! has labelled Becker's first test as coach a "huge failure", which is pretty kind compared to
the visceral reaction of some among the Twitterati. Here are a few polite
examples.
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