It was certainly possible to see trouble ahead for Novak Djokovic based on all the dents in his armour from 2016. But it would have taken a creative mind to see the latest knockout blow coming from 117th-ranked Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan in the second round of the Australian Open on Thursday.
When Istomin was asked how he would have responded if someone suggested such a thing a couple of weeks ago, he answered, “I would have said, ‘Are you crazy, or what?’”
But tennis is a game of centimetres — inches, if you’re stuck in the nonmetric world —
