Australia Open chief tells Novak Djokovic’s family to be ‘really careful’

Craig Tiley

Australian Open chief Craig Tiley on Saturday advised Novak Djokovic's family to be "really careful" of people using the tournament's global exposure as a platform for "disruptive" purposes.

It follows a video posted on a pro-Russian YouTube account showing Djokovic's father Srdjan posing in Melbourne Park with a fan holding a Russian flag that featured the face of Vladimir Putin. It sparked a backlash from Ukraine and led to calls for Djokovic senior to be banned from the tournament. He decided to skip his son's semi-final victory on Friday and it remains to be seen if he will be at Sunday's final. Tiley told the Melbourne Age newspaper he had spent "a fair amount of time talking to the Djokovic family."

"My advice is that you have to be really careful because if this is an event of global significance, it's a platform," he said he told them. "When you have hundreds of thousands of people come through the gate, you're going to naturally have some people that are coming here with an intention to be disruptive, and don't get yourself caught in the middle of that. "And they completely understand that," he added.

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