MELBOURNE, Australia — Playing a five-set match for just the third time in his career, Canadian Denis Shapovalov couldn’t hold off a late rally from his opponent in the second round of the Australian Open.
Shapovalov fell 6-3, 3-6, 6-1, 6-7 (4), 5-7 to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Wednesday to be eliminated from the first major of the year.
"It’s not really something you can train for," Shapovalov said of the match that lasted three hours 37 minutes. "I think it’s just experience. You have to go through it. You have to play these matches.
"Like today, Jo has so much experience playing these matches, I don’t have that much, that could have been the difference. He picked up his game when he needed to."
The 18-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ont., looked in control in the fifth set with an early break to go up 2-0. He had a chance to close out the match on serve at 5-3, but was broken by Tsonga.
The Frenchman won five straight games in the fifth to complete the victory.
"Just didn’t play a good game on my serve. Then he picked up his level," Shapovalov said.
Tsonga will next face either Australia’s Nick Kyrgios or Viktor Troicki of Serbia, who played later Wednesday.
The Frenchman smashed nine aces and converted on 3-of-8 break points. Shapovalov had 11 aces and was 4-of-11 on breaks.
Shapovalov, who was making his Australian Open debut, got out to a good start and had an early break in the first set to go up 3-1. He finished the opening set with five winners.
Tsonga rallied in the second and went ahead 4-2 after breaking Shapovalov.
The third set was all Shapovalov with him jumping out to a 3-0 set advantage before cruising to the set victory. Shapovalov, ranked No. 50 in the world, had 11 winners and two aces in the set.
Tsonga, the No. 15 seed, jumped ahead early in the fourth set tiebreak and forced a decisive fifth set.
Shapovalov won the only prior matchup between the two men during the second round of last year’s U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows.
The Canadian had defeated Stefanos Tsitsipas 6-1, 6-3, 7-6 (5) of Greece in the Australia Open’s first round.
Shapovalov rocketed up the ATP standings last year, starting at No. 250 and reaching a career-best No. 49 over the summer.
He reached the semifinals of the Rogers Cup in Montreal in August, becoming the youngest semifinalist at a Masters 1,000 event, then followed that up by reaching the fourth round of the U.S. Open.
In his seminal 2000 essay on choking in sports, Malcolm Gladwell began by describing how Jana Novotna appeared as she fell apart in a Wimbledon final.
"Novotna was now visibly agitated, rocking back and forth, jumping up and down. She talked to herself under her breath. Her eyes darted around the court … Novotna was unrecognizable, not an elite tennis player but a beginner again."
Whenever Denis Shapovalov is able to watch tape of his second-round loss on Wednesday at the Australian Open, he'll recognize those symptoms.
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The 18-year-old Canadian has been through many new professional experiences in the last five months. Now, after crumbling at the end of a match he had all but won, he knows what it's like to come apart at the seams as the world watches you do it.
Shapovalov came into this year's Australian Open exerting more gravity than the 50th ranked player in the world probably should. Despite his inexperience, he is becoming one of those bodies the tennis world circles around.
John McEnroe, the closest thing we have to an agreed-upon sage in these matters, recently called him "the future of our sport." He said Shapovalov would be top-five in the world within months.
All this excitement is based on four weeks of play at the end of last summer. Four marvellous weeks no doubt, but four weeks, nonetheless.
It's not what he's done that's made Shapovalov globally famous (beaten Rafael Nadal in a secondary tournament; reached the fourth round of a U.S. Open), but how he's looked as he's done it.
Shapovalov has the wild, 12-cylinder style associated with some of men's tennis' most exciting players – the Gael Monfils' and Nick Kyrgios' – but none of the emotional blind spots. He is a dervish between the lines and a diplomat outside them.
In a sport where there are currently only two types of on-court personality – imperturbable or erratic – Shapovalov uniquely combines both. People have reacted to that. Perhaps, at this point, overreacted.
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In the short time people have been paying serious attention to him, Shapovalov also hadn't taken a step wrong. A la McEnroe, the expectation seemed to be that he would rise and rise until he'd won something big. Probably in no time at all.
Now we know it's going to take a little time.
"Bad luck," Shapovalov said after Wednesday's athletic cave-in. "It's a sport. It happens, so …"
And left it there.
Shapovalov's breakthrough at Flushing Meadows came against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. In that September match, he turned the veteran Frenchman inside out.
Wednesday's rematch between the pair had more of a see-saw character. Shapovalov delighted, while Tsonga plodded. Both strategies were intermittently effective.
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Younger and more spry, the Canadian bounded into the fifth set. He had Tsonga down on the ground, 5-2. Shapovalov was within two points of ending it when Tsonga pulled out a stop. But it was over. You could feel it.
And then it started to turn.
In what should have been the final game of the match, Shapovalov's serve began to sail on him. His backhand turned into a cracked firehose. He hit the volley like he was trying to put the ball through, rather than over, the net.
As the wheels came off, Shapovalov did all the things Novotna had done – the rocking, the hopping, the muttering and the desperate stare. He was unrecognizable as an elite player.
For his part, Tsonga went Zen – he stopped trying. He put balls into the middle of the court, and counted on his shattered opponent to put them out.
Over an excruciating twenty-or-so minutes, Shapovalov gave back his advantage and more. He lost five games in a row and the match 3-6, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6(4), 7-5. As he left the court afterward, he appeared close to tears of frustration.
"As much as the loss hurts, you know, I don't find it a loss," Shapovalov said in his press conference. "I find it as an opportunity to learn."
For all of us, then.
Canadians are still new to tennis in terms of enjoying a national rooting interest at the highest level. That young fanbase has known some disappointment – Eugenie Bouchard losing a Wimbledon final in 2014; Milos Raonic going out at the same point two years later. But those losses seemed logical, and were never in doubt. We don't have many truly bitter defeats to look back on.
In that sense, this was a first. Though it came early in a tournament few Canadians watch live, it was the hard swing from innocence to experience that made it such a letdown.
For about three hours, it seemed as if Shapovalov was going to make John McEnroe a prophet, like right now. Tsonga was just the first. He was going to beat Kyrgios, and Grigor Dmitrov, and then the great names.
At moments on Wednesday, Shapovalov looked that good. Like he was playing at a different speed than everyone else. All he needed was a little momentum, a running jump into the pack leaders.
And then the kid who is already the most electric tennis player in our history turned into a teenage pumpkin.
It was one of those sports collapses that you as the viewer feel partially responsible for. You got ahead of yourself, and then the guy you were watching did the same thing. Obviously, that was all connected.
This is the point at which all of us – Shapovalov and the Canadians interested in his rise – assure ourselves that this was a blip. Better yet, as Shapovalov put it, a learning opportunity. He'll come back stronger and so forth.
Maybe. We won't know until the next time he's in this situation at a grand slam. At the earliest, that's the French Open in four-and-a-half months.
It does seem like a long while for us to wait and for Shapovalov to spend thinking.
Novotna lost in the Wimbledon final four times (Gladwell wrote about the third of those), but she won it in the end. Twice.
That's a nicer idea to dwell on right now.
If Wednesday accomplished anything in the still preposterously young career of Denis Shapovalov, it was reminding us that good things may come in time to good players. The worst thing they or you can do is rush them.
MELBOURNE—Jo-Wilfried Tsonga saved his best for last—really, really last. On Wednesday against Denis Shapovalov, the world No. 15 relied on fight and experience to claw his way into the third round, 3-6, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5.
The 18-year-old Canadian embraced the occasion for 95 percent of the three-hour and 37-minute match. In a rematch of his stunning US Open upset over Tsonga, Shapovalov almost made magic happen again, but the 2008 Australian Open finalist broke his heart with a late surge.
“I just continue to fight because ever since I’m playing tennis here I [have a] really good time here,” Tsonga told the Margaret Court Arena crowd. “It’s always a big moment for me to play on these courts. I continue to enjoy it and hope it going to continue this week and why not longer.”
For most of the day, it didn’t look like Tsonga would be around for very long at all. Tsonga started out slow and flat, a perfect storm of disaster as Shapovalov flew out of the gates with guns blazing. The Frenchman settled in, clearly not wanting a repeat of his straight-set loss in New York.
"For me, I think it was an advantage to play him for the second time because I knew he was able to do things, crazy things like he did today," Tsonga said.
The match was truly in the teen’s hands. Everyone knows Shapovalov has blistering groundstrokes backed up by a fiery spirit and lack of fear, but he’s also carrying newfound maturity and a touch of experience, thanks to his fourth-round run at the US Open.
The world No. 50 immediately stepped up in the third set with an early break capped off with a stunning backhand down-the-line. He’d pull off the same early break in the fifth set after Tsonga took charge of the fourth-set tiebreaker. It’s like the youngster had already perfected short-term memory loss, moving on quickly and purposefully.
Shapovalov had to pass just one final test, serving for the match at 5-3. Instead, Tsonga the fighter emerged from the shadows, taking advantage of Shapovalov’s inexperience (it was his Australian Open debut) to get the break and grab the momentum.
"As much as the loss hurts, I don't find it as a loss," Shapovalov said. "I find it as an opportunity to learn. I'm the type of guy when things don't go my way, instead of sulking or getting mad, down on myself, I go back on the court and try to work twice as hard so next time when I'm in that position I can hit some good serves and just close the match out."
It was all Tsonga from there, even pulling off an accidental tweener at 5-5 and winning the point, before serving out the match with a dominant final game.
"The most important for me, it's to fight, give my best on court until the last point," Tsonga said. "That's what I did today. I think he deserved to win also today, but I was also courageous and I did my job at the end. I think I deserve it, too."
Read Joel Drucker and Nina Pantic on TENNIS.com as they report from the Australian Open, and watch them each day on The Daily Mix:
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