Tennis: Novak Djokovic receives obscenity warning in semi-final win at Italian Open

Novak Djokovic knows he is not model behavior when he loses his cool on the tennis court.

However, you can’t help it.

Exactly two weeks after he was kicked out of the US Open, and one day after the chair umpire warned him for breaking his racket, Djokovic received a warning for obscenity midway through a 7-5, 6-3 win. about Casper Ruud in Italian. Semifinals open on Sunday.

Unlike his previous two outbursts, this time there were fans in the stands who could clearly hear how Djokovic dealt with his frustration.

Furthermore, with 1,000 viewers allowed at the Foro Italico for the first time this week, a large proportion of those in attendance were children.

“I don’t want to do it, but when it comes, it happens,” Djokovic said Saturday. “That’s how, I guess, sometimes I release my anger. And it’s definitely not the best message out there, especially for young tennis players looking at me.

Djokovic’s behavior once again overshadowed his performance, in a match in which he had to save two set points when Ruud served for the first set at 5-4, one of them with a delicate winning backhand shot.

Top-ranked Djokovic also served five aces in a single game to take a 6-5 lead in the first.

Ruud, 21, the first Norwegian player to contest a Masters 1000 semi-final and a product of Rafael Nadal’s academy, put up a lot of stamina and also produced the shot of the day: an over the shoulder hook shot for a winner as he ran back to chase a balloon, earning a thumbs up from Djokovic.

The obscenity warning came in the third game of the second set, at which point he had an ongoing dialogue with the chair umpire about a series of contested calls.

Still, Djokovic improved to 30-1 this year. His only loss came when he was expelled from the US Open for inadvertently hitting a linesman in the throat with a ball during his fourth-round match against Pablo Carreño Busta.

In Djokovic’s 10th Rome final, who has won four, he will face eighth seed Diego Schwartzman or 12th seed Denis Shapovalov.

Schwartzman beat nine-time Rome champion Nadal on Friday night.

In the women’s tournament, seed Simona Halep reached her third final in Rome by beating Garbiñe Muguruza 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 to improve her record in the tennis restart to 9-0.

Muguruza struggled with his serve and double faulted on the last two points of the 2-hour 16-minute match.

Halep, who lost to Elina Svitolina in the 2017 and 2018 finals, will face Karolína Plíšková or Markéta Vondroušová in Monday’s championship match.

Second-seeded Halep is 13-0 overall dating back to February, when she won a title in Dubai. After a five-month break from touring due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Romanian came back lifting another trophy in Prague last month. He then skipped the US Open due to travel and health concerns.