Nick Kyrgios’s one-man spectacular, equal parts performance art, dramatic monologue and top-notch tennis, will run on into the second week of Wimbledon. He beat Milos Raonic 5-7, 7-5, 7-6, 6-3, his second brilliantly entertaining victory in short succession, after his straight-sets win over Juan Monáco on Wednesday. It was, Kyrgios said, a “little bit of revenge” after Raonic beat him in the quarter-finals here last year. He will now play Richard Gasquet in the fourth round. Gasquet lost to Kyrgios here in 2014, so will be looking for a little vengeance himself.
For the first time this week Kyrgios got through a match without having a row with the umpire. In fact he made a point of showing an almost excessive deference, brushing the dust from the shoulders of the umpire’s jacket at the coin toss. Still, over the next three hours the Australian worked through his full repertoire of laughs, curses, shouts, poses and racket tosses, as well as, better yet, astonishing serves, through-the-legs shots and raging forehand winners.
Raonic and Kyrgios made for a study in contrasts, the one with a single white sleeve on his left arm, and the other wearing one on the right. While Raonic finished the game with hardly a hair out of place, having shown no more emotion than an occasional frown, Kyrgios swung wildly between glorious highs and furious lows, letting out howls of frustration – “Oh my God!” – when he missed simple shots and shouts of joy whenever he hit a winner. Sometimes he teased his opponent for playing shots with his eyes shut, sometimes he cursed him for the quality of his serving and sometimes he saluted him, saying over and again “Yeah, well played!” when Raonic hit a stroke that he admired.
As for Raonic, he did what he always does so well and laid down a bombardment of brutal serves, plenty of them up around 140mph. Whenever they came back, he tried to pin Kyrgios back into the corners of the court with his wicked forehand.
He is a man who likes to force his opponent to fit to his pattern of play. In the first set it seemed as though it was going to work, that Raonic’s consistency was going to win out. At the crucial moment, when he was 6-5 down, Kyrgios lost the run of himself. He sent down a series of wild serves, including three double faults, and allowed Raonic an easy break.
By the middle of the second set Kyrgios seemed to have fallen deep into some kind of slough of despond. At one point he snapped at a woman who, he thought, had told him to “pull his head in”. Kyrgios replied: “That’s not funny! I don’t think that’s funny at all!” At another he smashed his racket into the ground so hard that it bounced three rows back into the grandstand, where it was well caught by a spectator. Kyrgios even took up a position 12ft back from the baseline, right on the toes of the ballboy, to receive one of Raonic’s serves, which, predictably enough, was fired down the inside for an ace. Shortly afterwards Kyrgios tried to win a point with a volley played from between his legs.
Somewhere in among all this, something in Kyrgios clicked. He actually said he was helped by some good advice from a random member of the crowd, a man wearing a Batman T-shirt, who was sprawled across two seats and kept calling out “hit a bullet Nick!”
Whatever it was, Kyrgios started to loosen up. “When I’m in that state of mind, when I feel relaxed and I’m playing around, I think that’s when I play my best tennis,” he said afterwards. “I’m focusing but at the same time I’m having fun. When I find that balance, I play some really good tennis. I thought I was doing that today in the second, third and fourth.”
Raonic, whose own approach is ever so slightly robotic, seemed to be a little unsettled by all the disruption. Kyrgios had three shots at breaking Raonic when the score was 4-4 and missed them all but he soon got another chance. In the 11th game Kyrgios had three break points and won the game on the second with a cross-court forehand. Then he closed out the set with three straight aces of his own. In fact, one of the most impressive things about Kyrgios’s play was that he out-gunned Raonic all match long, hitting 34 aces to 18. In the third set everything settled down. It went with serve until Kyrgios won the tie-break 7-3. And by the fourth Kyrgios was in complete control.
It was only Kyrgios’s third win against a player ranked in the top 10. Soon enough he will surely be up there himself. Right now his thoughts are fixed on winning the Championship. “I think if I play the right style of tennis, obviously if I’m serving well, feeling good out there, I think I can go close.” One thing is for sure: the longer he is here, the more entertaining the tournament will be.
