Wimbledon: Djokovic puts away Anderson with ease

In pursuit of the first golden slam in the open era, Novak Djokovic is sure to feel the pressure mounting with each game as he inches closer to this historic feat. That wasn’t the case in his second-round Wimbledon matchup against Kevin Anderson, an experienced veteran Djokovic took down in 2018 for his fourth Wimbledon championship.

In straight sets (6-3, 6-3, 6-3), Novak Djokovic beat Kevin Anderson to advance to round three of Wimbledon where he will face either Andreas Seppi (Italy) or Denis Kudla (United States).

Each set of the match went about the same – Djokovic and Anderson each holding serve until Djokovic breaks through to take control of the set. It was a relatively clean game for both players as Anderson only committed three errors until the third set, and Djokovic not committing an error until his second match point – his only error of the match.

While the game was relatively unexciting with Novak in control for most of it, one thing that stood out to me was the consistency of his first serve. He attacked Anderson on the outside and inside consistently without ever utilizing the middle of the box. He landed his first serve about 63 percent of the time but won 84 percent of those points. Unfortunately for Anderson, he was never able to figure out how to respond to his serve as Djokovic would win his service games with ease while pushing Anderson to the brink every time he served.

Regardless of who he plays next at Wimbledon, it should be more of the same for Novak Djokovic in round three. Andreas Seppi was ranked 18th in the world at one point so perhaps he might make things interesting and Denis Kudla did upset the 30th seed in the first round to get to this point so he could bring some momentum into a matchup with Djokovic. However, Novak is playing for history at this point and whoever he plays is most likely not going to get in his way as he chases down perfection.