Novak Djokovic sweeps aside Tomas Berdych and is too good to win over fans

When Novak Djokovic is in the sort of imposing form he has displayed at times this fortnight, it is a sight as dispiriting as it is impressive. With the old axis waning, and the new front yet to emerge, all hope of resistance appears doomed to failure. Woe betide all who dare to stand in his path.

The future of tennis shall be a Djokovic boot stamping on a human face, forever. Perhaps this is why the Wimbledon crowd have failed to warm to him. As he hewed his way to another straight-sets win, another defiant pump of the fist, another grand slam semi-final, there remained a distinct sang-froid that only really lifted in the rare moments when his opponent, Tomas Berdych, grabbed the upper hand.

Of the 11,000 spectators crammed into Court No1, perhaps two to three per cent were Djokovic fans, two to three per cent Berdych fans, and the rest Andy Murray fans desperately willing Djokovic to do a cruciate, but unsure how to express this in a three-word chant. This is Djokovic's problem, then: he is too inhumanely good for his own good.

Even the haughty crown prince Roger Federer had the decency to cry the first time he won here. With his bandaged knees and painful grimace, Rafael Nadal positively oozes pathos. Djokovic, on the other hand, is the sort of opponent you would encounter in a computer game on the hardest setting. Tireless, impregnable, ruthless. An adversary to be respected, perhaps feared, but not necessarily loved.

Argentina's Juan Martin del Potro will be cheered like one of our own when he takes him on in tomorrow's semi-final. And when Djokovic speaks casually about his limitless capacity for improvement, you wonder whether it might not be time to abandon all hope, to leave this cold-blooded Serbian droid to his own devices and find something else to be good at. "There's always something I feel I can do better," he said. "I still feel there is room for improvement. That's something that excites me actually for the future."

But every so often, the tiniest crack appears in his immaculate edifice. And though the scoreline - 7-6, 6-4, 6-3 - looked breezy, it was far from easy at times. On this evidence, Djokovic is just a little way short of his 2011 vintage. There were moments when Berdych, the seventh seed, caused Djokovic considerable discomfort; not least at the start of the second set, when the world No?1 was broken twice in succession.

"It was a very close match," said Djokovic. "It could really have gone either way. He could have won both the first two sets. I don't know how I managed to turn it around." The first set was incredibly tight. Berdych settled quickly, serving well on clutch points and getting a good deal of traction with his inside-out forehand.

As Djokovic let slip his third break point, he cursed the air and smacked the net as he walked back to his chair. This is generally a sign that he is moving up a notch. Still, Berdych forced the set into a tie-break. At 5-6, he wound up another searing forehand, and put it an inch wide of the sideline. That was the margin by which he lost the first set. What happened next was strange.

Berdych, still high on the fumes of his missed opportunity, responded brilliantly, breaking twice to lead 3-0. Then, serving with the new balls, his level dropped just as Djokovic began to wake up again. He won just two of his next 10 points on serve. Djokovic recovered both breaks, then capitalised on a string of errors to break Berdych for a third and decisive time. T

hat was the ball game. So, putting our British/Scottish caps on, what did we learn? Perhaps that Djokovic is still not entirely comfortable on the backhand slice. Murray could tease out a few errors there. The occasional success of Berdych's booming forehand demonstrates that Djokovic is still potentially vulnerable to a player with the guts to be aggressive, to go for clean winners from the baseline. But perhaps the biggest lesson was learnt by Berdych.

"You have to play really on the limit to have a chance to beat him," he said. By which he meant: not for a few games, or for a set, but from the moment you step on court to the moment you step off it. This is the new future of men's tennis. Novak against the world, forever.