Rafa 21

An unreal Nadal gives new meaning to "The Race"

Just a few games into the first set of the men’s singles final at the Australian Open, Rafael Nadal could be seen sweating buckets onto the court. He had to request one of the ball persons to bring a towel to wipe the water from the surface. His opponent Daniil Medvedev at the other end looked menacing. Ever the anti-hero, booed as he entered the court—really for no apparent reason—Medvedev seemed, at first, to be relishing the occasion.

Nadal was chasing history; he was bidding to become the first man to win 21 major titles. At the US Open, last year’s final major, Medvedev had stood between Nadal’s great rival, Novak Djokovic and his own quest to win his 21st grand slam, and he had managed to successfully thwart the Serbian. It was clear that he was taking joy from being a fourth wheel of sorts in the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic rivalry, a race for grand slam supremacy that has come to define the sport’s modern era.

For much of the first three sets on Sunday, Medvedev looked like he was about to play spoilsport again. To borrow an expression made famous by the football manager Arsene Wenger, Nadal seemed to be playing “a little bit with the handbrake on.” Medvedev, on the other hand, even if he wasn’t playing at his best, had come to court with a clear strategy: to give Nadal plenty of off-pace, junk balls to his weaker backhand, and to keep every rally focussed on that one wing. This isn’t a tactic that Nadal is unaccustomed to facing. His usual response is to find a way to get outside of the ball—through footwork that is so magical that it must be seen to be believed—and to then whip the ball with his fabled forehand. Here, however, Nadal, partly because of the quality of Medvedev’s hitting (the slower, deeper balls can sometimes be hard to time) but mainly because of some inhibition in his mind was slicing the ball back with his backhand. And those slices just weren’t cutting enough.

Through the entirety of the first set Nadal rarely attempted to go outside the ball and hit a forehand. It was conservativism that was bordering on the reckless. But in the second set, he released the handbrake—but with that came the errors. He went ahead only to let Medvedev back in a deeply attritional battle that culminated in a tie-break which the Russian took. At this stage, there were legitimate concerns over Nadal’s ability to mount a comeback.

Nadal has been a forerunner par excellence. His career has seen him rarely lose when he’s been up two sets to love. But he’s also rarely come back from two sets to love down. On the last five occasions when he’d lost the opening two sets in the finals of a major, he had succumbed to rather telling losses. Indeed, not since the Round of 16 at Wimbledon in 2007, against Mikhail Youzhny, had Nadal managed to overcome a two sets to love deficit.

So, the odds were heavily stacked against Nadal. Watching this, you’re thinking to yourself that the match for all practical purposes is over. At the same time there’s a voice telling you, Rafa is Rafa. But it was looking bleaker still for him when he served at 0-40, 2-3 down in the third set. Three breakpoints that were effectively three match points. But Medvedev spurned each of those opportunities, despite landing his returns with interest every time. These errors, given the context of the match up to the point, were hard to explain—but as Medvedev put it later, “this is tennis.” Things like this happen, and the key is to both wait for this to occur, and to then capitalise. The best players in the world do just that and in the following game, Nadal forced Medvedev into a series of further errors, allowing him to charge ahead in the set. Rafa is Rafa.

This turnaround also led to the fans weighing particularly heavily on Medvedev’s mind. It was clear that he was feeling unloved. His misses—his double faults included—were being cheered in a manner unbecoming of a sporting crowd. But even after Nadal wrapped up the third set, there was a feeling that all that Medvedev had to do was to re-focus, to get back to doing what he’d done so effectively in the first two sets. Oddly, though, as the rallies lengthened (Medvedev was winning most of these exchanges in the early parts of the match) Nadal was getting stronger. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was a man who few months ago was on crutches, wondering if he’d ever pick up a tennis racquet again; this was a man who just weeks ago had had genuine doubts over his ability to play in Melbourne; this was also a man playing arguably one of the top two hardcourt players in the world. But none of this seemed to matter.

As the match wore on, there was also something else that Nadal noticed: Medvedev’s relative ineptitude at the net. Drop shorts on hard courts can often be counterproductive. But Nadal tried bringing Medvedev forward at every conceivable opportunity. Not all of these attempts were necessarily successful, but this made Medvedev work harder and the dividends paid off in the deciding set. There, finally, Nadal managed to unleash from the baseline. Rallies that Medvedev would have ordinarily found routine were now proving monstrous.

There was a blip at the end from Nadal when he allowed himself to be broken when serving for the championship at 5-4. But the break-break is a Djokovic and Nadal speciality—they have an uncannily ability of breaking the opponent’s serve on the game immediately succeeding their own surrender of serve. Here, at 5-5, a different player might have been thinking about the opportunities that went by. But Nadal dissected Medvedev’s serve with clinical precision. A match lacking on quality—this wasn’t a contest comparable to some of the great finals we’ve seen both in Australia and elsewhere—was finally, after more than 5 hours of tennis, giving us the best of Nadal: relentless and forceful from the baseline, his feet moving with power, grace and agility, and his hands making the ball talk.

With the final break secured, the match was done. And Nadal had managed to achieve the unimaginable—major championship number 21, moving him ahead of Federer and Djokovic. He had been, in Medvedev’s words, “unreal.” He had elevated the level of his tennis in the dying stages of the match in a manner that only the greats can. He had found a physical level in the fifth set that bordered on the ridiculous.

For the fan—especially the non-partisan one—the amazing thing is that the race is still on. The relative greatness of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic isn’t going to be determined only by who finishes highest on the grand slam chart. But this race has beguiled us through the last several years and even with the advent of a new generation of tennis players, the battle is still alive. Djokovic will be back on the tennis courts at Dubai next month and when Roland Garros rolls around—and one can only hope he’ll be able to play in Paris—the stakes will be all the grander.