Novak Djokovic continued his perfect record at Wimbledon on Friday when he moved past Stan Wawrinka 6-3, 6-1, 7-6 (5) to reach the last 16 in London.
The second seed dictated play in the match. He broke his opponent’s serve once in the first set and three times in the second, and went on to win the third set tie-break.
“I have to say that it’s amazing what Stan is doing. Still his age, after several surgeries. We are two old guys fighting with the young guns, I think it’s important to acknowledge that,” Djokovic said in his on-court interview. “It’s amazing. It’s inspiring. Like Andy Murray, he was forced to drop in the rankings in the last couple of years and is trying to build his ranking. We’ve had some amazing battles on the biggest courts in the sport. I respect Stan a lot as a player. He’s an extremely nice guy. So I wish him all the best for the for the rest of the season.”
“He was two points away from extending this match to another day. Coming into the court, we knew that it was going to be really tight to finish the match today,” Novak added. “One of us had to win in straight sets and it looked very, very good for me the first two sets. Then he raised his level, I dropped mine a little bit. And yeah, the crowd got involved. It was a good atmosphere. And hopefully you guys enjoyed it.”
Match statistics: aces (11-6), double faults (1-0), winners (38-12), unforced errors (26-19), total points won (96-70).
With his two-hour, six-minute win, Novak set a fourth-round clash against 17th seed Hubert Hurkacz of Poland (H2H record 5-0), who defeated 14th seed Lorenzo Musetti 7-6 (4), 6-4, 6-4 earlier in the day.
Photo: AP
