There was no rousing declaration that he would be ready for the rematch, merely a half-hearted statement that he hoped to be. The prospect of a semi-final against Nick Kyrgios, who antagonised him in 2019 to the point of firing a full-strength forehand straight at his body, was not one he could contemplate just yet. At times I was thinking I wouldn’t be able to finish the match.” “I had to find a way to serve a little bit differently. “In the abdominal area something is not going well, to be honest,” he said. This time, he sounded forlorn, almost fatalistic, as he addressed the crowd. Typically, Nadal bounces all across the court after a victory such as this, shaking his hair out from his bandana like a sheepdog that has just gone swimming in a pond. Except this time, you half-wondered if Nadal, through his resolve to take himself to places few humans were physically designed to go, was his own worst enemy. Truly, only somebody with his mind-bending haul of 22 major titles could have seen this mission through, purging intense pain to sink a 24-year-old Californian in the form of his life. It was an astonishingly bull-headed performance from a player who never ceases to astonish. Nadal, channelling all his mulish obstinacy to vanquish Fritz in a fifth-set champions’ tie-break, vaulted clean past it. There comes a point, though, where the quest for glory collides headlong with the necessities of self-preservation. Nadal, against all odds and with Laver sitting front-row centre in the royal box to watch him, is hell-bent here on becoming the second.
Just one man, Rod Laver, has ever achieved the calendar grand slam. Ultimately, the magnitude of the prize in sight was too great for him to retire hurt. When the trainer emerged for a second time to treat his worsening abdominal injury, he just gazed into the middle distance, weighing up whether, under a brutal bombardment from metronomic serve machine Taylor Fritz, to cut his losses.
Soon he was in such agony, he briefly buried his head in the green canopy behind him on Centre Court. With one vehement gesture, slapping his hands and then making a sweeping motion that his Spanish observers quickly interpreted as “please leave”, he was pleading for his son, already a set down, to bail out of a bruising match with his body still intact.įor a while even Nadal, a man seemingly sculpted out of granite, was inclined to take heed. The signal from Rafael Nadal’s father, Sebastian, was unmistakeable.
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