Novak Djokovic won his first title of the year by dominating Rafael Nadal 6-1, 6-2 in the Qatar Open final on Saturday.
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The world number one cruised to victory in a match lasting just one hour 13 minutes, capturing his 60th career title and starting 2016 with the same dominance he showed past year when he won 3 of the 4 majors and 11 titles in all.
Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal will break their 23-23 head-to-head record when they meet for the 47th time in the Qatar Open final Saturday. Obviously knowing that I can play a match makes me feel relieved a bit, but it’s a little issue that has been there for most of this week.
Despite a softer draw, he did play two three-set matches – against Pablo Carreno Busta in the first round, and Andrey Kuznetsov in the quarterfinals – but his resilience and refusal to be rattled in both cases was impressive and reminiscent of the Nadal of old, rather than the 2015 model.
The Davis Cup victor lost 6-3 6-2 to world number six Tomas Berdych but can reflect on the best run of his career so far.
Nadal cut a forlorn figure after the match and said he’d never seen anyone produce a performance like Djokovic’s. Talking about some past year, Nadal had not been successful in defeating Novak.
Djokovic has been the man of the honor as he has beaten Nadal in some of the last matches.
The Serbian broke in the second and sixth games and closed the set out to love.
It will be Nadal’s first hard court final in 18 hard court tournaments since he won the 2014 Qatar Open title. Nadal managed to contain the damage and pull level at deuce, but Djokovic eventually pulled ahead, despite a challenge from Nadal.
Meanwhile, Djokovic overcame losing his serve in the first two games of each set to beat his Argentina opponent.
Djokovic has already won the Australian Open five times, and he’ll be a heavy favourite again entering this year’s edition.
But it was a sad story for the Spaniard, who was playing in the 99th career final.
Nadal certainly didn’t play badly and found plenty of room to fire his patented backhand down the line, but the Serb handled it remarkably well.
Despite one rally going the distance of 20 shots, Nadal initiated a mini-revival to hold serve in game 4 with an ace following a couple of long returns from Djokovic. “Ivan loves tennis, had been on tour for many years, he played so great, was no. 3 in the world. These kind of matches give me a great deal of satisfaction”, he said.
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“I haven’t dropped a set the entire week”, said Djokovic.
