Things weren’t looking good for this Australian wildcard. Then he made a change

1 month ago 16

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Jordan Thompson had an epiphany early in the second set of his first-round Australian Open match on Monday: stop playing like Jordan Thompson.

The Australian wildcard had never played Argentinian Juan Manuel Cerundolo before and it showed. Thompson didn’t know his game, and so didn’t know that his natural, defence-first, baseline game was not going to work against the South American claycourter.

With vocal support from the crowd, Jordan Thompson advanced to the second round.

The first set was like vigorous Pong, and the numbers told the compelling story that the longer the points went, the more likely the left-handed Cerundolo was to win them.

By the second set, Thompson worked out that this game would be best played like pub pool – short points are good points.

He started to play aggressive, front-foot tennis, pushing to the net and serve-volleying, not his most natural or comfortable place to be, and the shift worked.

He started playing more like Pat Rafter than Jordan Thompson, taking bigger risks and getting up the court as often as he could.

In his purple top, purple shoes and socks and compression sleeves, Thompson looked like a bearded Wimbledon ballkid, or a tennis Wiggle, but the change in his game unsettled Cerundolo.

Thompson levelled the match in the second set then rifled through the next two to close out the match in four sets, 6-7, 7-5, 6-1, 6-1 – ensuring that one-point slam winner and Thompson’s good mate Jordan Smith wasn’t the only Jordan to do good things on a tennis court in Melbourne this week.

“It’s odd sitting in the crowd and watching a mate. I enjoyed it, but the nerves were through the roof. Now I know how he feels when he’s watching me,” Thompson said of his friend, who won $1 million in the inaugural staging of the competition.

Thompson won through to the second round.

As for his own game, he said he knew he needed to change things up.

“I have got my team telling me to get to the net, but I knew I needed to do it myself. I just thought I would be able to get into more return games. But he was serving well, playing well, playing great from the back. He was moving well. That put pressure on me.”

Thompson, who has made the second round here six times, knows the monkey still sits on his back, playing with his ear lobe, asking if he is any danger of getting through to the third round. The monkey, mind you, should recall that Thompson is here as a wildcard.

“When I was down a set and down break points out there, I thought, ‘geez, this is not looking good’, but yeah, I’ve given myself another crack. I don’t know what Australian Open this is for me. I think it’s well over 10. Just going to have to do something different.”

Fans and players now seeing red

In 2024, Thompson’s most interesting contribution was to decry the Open as the “wokest tournament ever” after discovering organisers had relaxed rules to allow fans to come and go from seats between games not just at the change of ends. How this made it woke remains as big a head scratcher two years on as it did then.

It apparently peeved players; well, it peeved Thompson at the time. But not nearly as much as it peeved tennis fans before the change. Standing in a stairwell looking at concrete wall while you finish that Aperol Spritz you just bought and were wondering if you needed a second trip to the loo and maybe another overpriced orange drink in a plastic cup before you got back to your seat.
But woke? No. Though to be fair, most things labelled woke are almost now, by definition, not.
Anyway, that’s so two years ago.

Thankfully, Thompson wasn’t on centre court at night so avoided having to deal with this year’s change – net posts that flash red to signal line calls.

The umpire’s chair flashes red too, all when a ball is deemed by the technology to have gone out.

It isn’t woke – the seating policy wasn’t either – but how do you describe the latest change? Natty? Smart? Unnecessary? Yeah, unnecessary. But unnecessary in a harmless, “who really gives a toss” sort of way. Like putting numbers on the backs of Test cricketers.

It is apparently Boomerish to remember a time when actual people stuck an arm out to signal a ball was out, and stoically, if not happily, submitted to sitting mute while bratty players abused them for bad calls.