Rafael Nadal lays down his towel, spreads it across two parallel courtside advertising boards. He gently tugs at the near corners to ensure it is taut. Then looks at it again, pulls the far right-hand corner just a little. He squinches his face and surveys the symmetry, pats it with his hand. Content, he turns on his heels towards the baseline, ready for his serving ritual.
In the quarter-finals against Denis Shapovalov, Nadal completed his shirt-tug, hair-tuck, face-wipe routine 146 times. He won 100 of those points on his first serve over the course of five sets, in four hours and eight minutes. He lost 4kg in sweat under the sun.
Two days later, against Matteo Berrettini, it was only 102 first serves (70 of those won), over four sets, and two hours and 55 minutes. This time we do not know his post-match weight but we do know Nadal when we see him. Defying the physics of his breaking body and straightening his towel throughout all the suffering and fighting he has poured into his two-decade career.
“We need to suffer, we need to fight,” he said afterwards. “And that is the only way to be where I am today.”
With each passing match at the Australian Open, Nadal’s march towards that coveted 21st grand slam title becomes clearer. Maybe not easier, but at least more deliberate. The Spaniard cannot see the stars aligning – the roof is rolled out over Rod Laver Arena and above it a thick blanket of cloud throws thick droplets over Melbourne Park. A storm has been brewing here all week, and now everybody is finally acknowledging it – except for the man right in its eye.
It is unclear what the cogs inside Nadal’s brain are doing as he shrugs his shoulders post-match and reiterates that he is “still very far from the No 21, no?” That he does not even care so much for that ubiquitous No 21. Or that he could win his first Australian Open since 2009. He is not even all that fazed, he says, with winning this specific Australian Open. Rather, he simply feels alive to be playing tennis at all.
Nadal’s apparent lack of a penchant for statistics means he may not have realised his very presence in this semi-final means at least one member of the big three has now made the final four of every grand slam since the 2003 French Open. The only blip was the 2020 US Open, which Nadal and Roger Federer sat out and during which Novak Djokovic defaulted in the fourth round.
There may well have been another early in 2022 given Federer and Djokovic are absent and Nadal’s 35-year-old body was not supposed to be in any condition to contest this tournament. The congenital foot injury which has so heavily restricted his ability to compete over the last two years had him basically retired little more than six weeks ago.
“Every day has been an issue in terms of problems on the foot,” he says. “The doubts are gonna be here probably for the rest of my career without a doubt, because I have something that we cannot fix.”
It is evident in his shuffle, a quick sort of orthotic-assisted stride which punctuates every other point. His injuries over the years are so well-documented they are basically remembered by heart. The hip, the back, the hamstring. “A lot of them you know,” he says, “and some of them you don’t.”
And so he conducts most of his business from the court’s central corridor – whatever reduces the load – backing Berrettini into both corners. The Italian especially does not like his left side, and by the end of the match his unforced error count is up at 39.
Nadal continues to surprise the public even more than he surprises himself. And perhaps the person most in shock is the exiled Djokovic, who undoubtedly watched every minute of this match in Belgrade in the knowledge that there is no guarantee he will be allowed to contest another major so long as he is not vaccinated.
The Spaniard’s other fellow near immortal, Federer, is 40 with a dodgy knee and may well not have a chance to add to his own grand slam tally of 20. This is Nadal’s first major appearance, over almost 19 years since his debut at Wimbledon in 2003, in which neither Djokovic nor Federer are joining him.
“I just feel happy to be part of this amazing era of tennis, sharing all these things with another two players, that’s it,” he says. “In some ways it doesn’t matter if somebody achieves one more or one less.”
The courtside crowd clearly have different ideas, and ride every wave of emotion through Nadal’s fast start and third-set slow-down. In the fourth he finally has his ascendancy.
He watches the net bulge with Berrettini’s final shot and then stands smiling, still as a statue, before pounding the air with his fist. It is his first real show of emotion of the entire match. Then he embraces his opponent at the net, returns calmly to his bench and neatly lays out his towel.
