Put aside all the fear and wonder.
Rafael Nadal’s tennis career has long been an exercise in puzzle-solving, for him and everyone else.
At first, we wondered if anyone could really play tennis like that. They were the in his late teens, when he left everyone scratching their heads about the physics of spinning a ball soaring toward his opponents’ eyes. Then came the question of how long he could play with his rugged, battered physical style before his body fell apart.
For much of the last decade, in which he lost numerous seasons to injuries, he struggled with when to return. When he returned, we looked to see if he had lost anything – looking for signs of aging and slippage.
But there has never been anything like solving Nadal’s riddle right now as he desperately searches for what is likely one last chance for a magical spring on his beloved red clay, playing on his left hip and his left leg surgically repaired and re-injured and miscellaneous. other parts of the body damaged.
In Barcelona this week, Nadal played his first tournament since January, his fourth in 17 months. So what should we think of his first-round demolition of Flavio Cobolli, a 21-year-old Italian who was physically and psychologically outmatched?
How can we consider his defeat against the Australian Alex de Minaur, 25 years old and 11th in the ATP rankings, but without much success on clay when his speed and fluidity suggest that he should have a good one?
What kinds of clues could they provide?
Cobolli and De Minaur only know a tennis world where Nadal is a divinity. They played him on a field named after him. Cobolli appeared to buckle at the knees after her first look at the headband. De Minaur, right after the victory, was just grateful that he didn’t have to face Nadal a few years earlier.
The Italian made 41 “unforced errors”, including 27 of the 34 points won by Nadal in the first set. How many errors are actually unforced in this kind of psychological situation?
“Rafa is back,” Cobolli said after leaving the court following Nadal’s 6-2, 6-3 defeat.
Wait. Is it? He doesn’t really seem to know, at least not yet.
After beating Cobolli, Nadal – a 22-time Grand Slam champion, a 12-time winner at Barcelona and the greatest player of all time on clay – lamented the difficulty of solving the conundrum that awaits him. Reaching one’s full potential means putting maximum stress on one’s greatest weakness, one’s body, so that, perhaps, it can maximize everything else.
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“Honestly, it’s super difficult,” he said. “It’s hard to deal with all that and do logical things when you’re competing and when I’m competing in places that are super special, emotionally, to me.
“It was difficult to deal with the conditions today, but I managed it because I was more or less in control. I didn’t have to make a huge physical effort. Let’s see if I can continue to handle this the right way,” he said.
He has to press hard enough to find his rhythm. He needs to undergo the necessary testing to be able to get the most out of the French Open at the end of May, but not to the point where he gets injured and can’t make it to the French Open.
Add to that playing in front of Spanish crowds, in his favorite tournaments, and with perhaps the most competitive psyche on the planet, and the conundrum quickly becomes very complicated.
“At the moment the main thing is not to win, but rather to leave the tournament in good health,” Nadal said after De Minaur beat him 7-5, 6-1. “After losing the first set, the match was over.”
This is the player who, two years ago, came back two sets ahead in the final of the Australian Open against Daniil Medvedev after barely playing for months. Two months later in Indian Wells and two service breakdowns in the deciding set against Sebastian Korda, he came back strong to win in a third set tie-break.
This is the player who numbed his left foot to dead weight with anesthetic injections to win the French Open for the 14th time.
Things are different now. In addition to the tender hip area and chronically injured foot, he suffers from an abdominal muscle injury that has barely allowed him to serve for the past two months and forced him to perform a reduced movement that does not hardly resembles twisting. , the torque move that helped propel him to so much success.
For years, tennis fans – and many players – have preached the value of next-generation data and statistics to gauge quality. Nadal, not a big numbers person himself, defies the data. A backhand roll on a tight angle into a big point, a sprint to catch a drop shot and return it with a perfectly lifted lob, a screaming forehand followed by a signature windmill fist pump.
It doesn’t take much for the most fervent dataheads to throw away the statistics sheets and place him in the French final on the second Sunday in June.
His matches have rarely been exercises in logic and even less so now.
But fFor those who like numbers, his first serve was usually around 110 miles per hour (177 kilometers per hour), which is about 10-15% below his 2022 average. Anyone who has seen Nadal even a few times before this The week could tell he was serving at what looked like three-quarter speed.
He also made many mistakes. After all this time away, it was hardly a surprise or an indication of how lively he would be a month from now.
Of course, he could have done more, maybe served harder, he said, but it’s a trade-off between doing something that allows him to play better this week, but which could deprive him of “the opportunity to play the next day or two.” or in terms of weeks, in Madrid or Rome.
There’s another factor to consider: no one discount Nadal’s chances as much as he does. He’s won those 14 French Open titles, but he sometimes appears shrugging his shoulders, shaking his head and talking like he has no chance. It could be called sandbagging if his comrades took it all seriously. This is not the case, especially on clay.
Paul Annacone, who coached Nadal’s rival Roger Federer through some of his toughest fights, called Wednesday’s match for the Tennis Channel and really liked what he saw.
“Gotta stay healthy and play a bunch of games,” Annacone wrote in a text message shortly after the game ended. Then he added a few words of warning to the rest of the pack. “He’ll improve a lot if he keeps playing, but I don’t think he was that far away.”
Like everyone, Annacone saw these flashes of Nadal who is always one moment away from magic.
Against Cobolli, it was that forehand that stretched down the line from deep in the corner when the point seemed far away. With a flick of the wrist, the ball tore through the field. To land the shot, Nadal had to crouch to the side while running on that surgically repaired hip.
Against De Minaur, there were a handful of blistering setbacks in the first set as the Spaniard revved his engine in fits and starts, testing how close he could get to the edge. One of them left the Australian, hands on hips, wondering how he could have walked past him. Another had him hit his racket.
Here is a new generation number that deserves reflection.
This is called “steal score,” the percentage of points a player wins when their opponent has them on the defensive. According to Tennis Data Innovations and TennisViz, the companies that collect and process the data, the tour average is 33 percent. Nadal has long mastered the art of switching from defense to offense. Against Cobolli, Nadal’s steal score was 47 percent. He was cautious, but not to the detriment of one of the characteristics of his game. The serve has never really been a strength.
His next conundrum is a little more pedestrian: the schedule. Next week is the Madrid Open. It’s on red clay, but clay is played differently from Roland-Garros due to the altitude of the city (600 meters higher than Paris) and the harder composition of the crushed brick. Playing there may not do much in terms of preparation for the French Open, but Nadal is loath to miss one of his last chances to play in front of a home crowd, if it truly is his last season.
The Italian Open in Rome is a better facsimile of the French Open. He wants to play that too, but can his fragile body withstand two more high-level tournaments, then the five-set events of a Grand Slam?
Passion or pragmatism?
Rest or rhythm?
The Rafael Nadal enigma continues.
(Top photo: Joan Valls/Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)