Nick Kyrgios lets his tennis do the talking – if only it was always like this

After being blown away by him in 85 preposterously one-sided minutes, Filip Krajinovic, the 30-year-old from Serbia, said that he had “never had anyone destroy me like that”.

Krajinovic was the No.26 seed and a finalist at Queen’s two weeks ago, so he is a reasonable witness. “Today (Friday) was unreal,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

He was also absolutely clear in his opinion that with Kyrgios in this form, there is no one in the world who could have beaten him.

Here lies Kyrgios and the conundrum. The tormented genius. The supreme artist, fatally flawed. Who knows what he could have achieved in his career if he could arrive on court with his head as consistently clear as it was here?

Tennis like that just shouts “potential champion” at you. But you don’t know what you are going to get from Kyrgios or when you are going to see tennis like that from him again. His career is one long dissertation on how high talent can take you and how it can leave you short if you haven’t the head for heights.

At altitude yesterday (Thursday), though, Kyrgios was sublime. His antics in the first round - the shouting, the spitting, the disrespecting which last night (Thursday) earned him a dollars 10,000 (pounds 8,212) fine - were all still fresh in the mind.

Kyrgios had, as a result of the first round, been heavily dumped on by us lot in the British media. Thus it was, yesterday (Thursday), that we headed off to No 2 Court to see what kind of havoc he could wreak in the second round.

The gentleman we found there was some kind of strange twin to the Kyrgios of Tuesday. There is an investigation still under way into the spitting incident, so maybe that was on his mind and influenced his behaviour, though trying to figure out Kyrgios’s mind is, of course, an uncompletable mission.

The man we saw was very purposeful and, from the off, mesmerisingly good. He won his first service game to love, with two delicious drop shots.

His next service game included three aces and was also won to love. Thus was a pattern set. He didn’t drop a point on his service in the whole first set.

For the entirety of the match, he was averaging two aces per service game, some of those off the second serve, which was not notably different in speed to the first. As Krajinovic said, he just didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t as though Kyrgios was a one-weapon man. His all-court touch was magical. In total, he hit 50 winners, from all parts of the court, his whipped forehand causing untold damage.

And, of course, there was a bit of the old entertainer in there, too: a tweener lob that was utterly unnecessary, for instance, and another tweener that was very nearly a winner.

“I hope you just loved my tennis today,” Kyrgios said afterwards. How could you not? “Just all watch the highlights,” he said, though the show reel won’t be short.

Remember that this was a crowd ready to turn on Kyrgios at the slightest invitation. Pretty soon, though, he had them hooked and happy and when he broke in the first game of the third set with a brilliantly reached lob, a chorus of pro-Aussie chanting emanated from the crowd.

His own interactions were reasonably disciplined. He got cross when someone coughed at the moment of his ball toss. It was probably appropriate, towards the end, that a champagne cork should pop loudly, just as Kyrgios was about to wind up for a serve. He shot the most disdainful of looks at the appropriate part of the crowd but, really, he should have joined them for a glass or two afterwards.

In among all the shots he played were those that he saved for his media conference following the match.

“I just wanted to,” he said, “I don’t know, just prove to people that, like, I’m really good.” But he is obviously motivated, too, by the opportunity to answer back to what he describes as “the media’s disrespect”. His performance, he said, was “just kind of a reminder to put you all back in your place”.

“There was just nothing the media possibly could tell me I did wrong today.” Correct. “I just know that you can’t possibly ask me anything and stir anything up.”

Well, we can always try. “And I love it because then you can’t write anything.” Well, that’s not true at all. We can tell our audience how breathtakingly good you were and how honours boards around the world might look different if you were like this all of the time.

-The Times

Originally published as Nick Kyrgios lets his tennis do the talking – if only it was always like this