From sprinting to the baseline before the warm-up to the alignment of his water bottles, Rafael Nadal is famously a creature of habit. But as the Spaniard walked off Pat Rafter Arena after an arduous three-set defeat to Australia’s Jordan Thompson, there was a small but notable departure from his usual routine.
After directing a wave to all four sides of the court, as is his wont, Nadal put his hand to his mouth and blew the crowd a kiss. A final farewell to Brisbanites, perhaps? It is too early in his return from a year-long absence with a hip injury to say – and after all the cautious pronouncements he has made this week, we should probably know better than to speculate.
Yet the sight of Nadal leaving the court for a medical timeout five games into the deciding set of a 5-7, 7-6 (8-6), 6-3 defeat, and just three matches into a season he has suggested could be his last, would have been alarming enough in itself. That the source of concern was the left hip on which he underwent surgery last June will inevitably puncture the sense of optimism surrounding the Spaniard’s comeback prospects.
“I need to see how I wake up tomorrow morning,” said Nadal, who missed three match points in the second set. “I hope it is not important and I hope to have the chance to be practising next week and to play in Melbourne. Honestly, I am not 100% sure of anything now.
“[The injury] is [in] a very similar place to what happened last year, but different stuff, no? I feel it is more the muscle; last year, it was the tendon. I feel the muscle is tired. For sure it is not the same [as] last year at all because, when it happened last year, I felt something drastic immediately. Today, I didn’t feel anything.
“The only problem is, because the place is the same, you are a little bit more scared than usual.”
Given that the contest raged for three hours and 26 minutes in oppressive humidity, muscular fatigue would certainly seem plausible. As Nadal pointed out, it is impossible to predict how the body will respond to such an intense increase in workload after so long on the sidelines. The impressive wins over Dominic Thiem and Jason Kubler that propelled the 37-year-old into the quarter-finals were both completed inside an hour and a half, so this was by far the most significant test of his physicality to date.
It needn’t have been so. Nadal stood within a point of a straight-sets victory three times in the latter stages of the second set, on each occasion fluffing his lines. Over the course of a career that has brought 22 grand slams, the Spaniard’s overhead has been barely less dependable than his metronomic forehand. Here, though, he netted an angled backhand smash on a first match point at 5-4 in the second set, then sprayed a forehand approach wide at 6-4 in the tiebreak. The final chance came on his own serve, but Thompson found a deep return before forcing an error with a precise forehand.
While Nadal’s injury scare inevitably overshadowed the evening, the brilliance of Thompson’s performance was impossible to overlook. Unbreakable in his previous two matches, Nadal was put under intolerable pressure by the boldness of the Australian’s return game, winning less than half his second serve points as Thompson took the ball on the rise and went bounding forward time and again. Harrying and hustling the Spaniard with his incisive volleying and aggression, Thompson balanced a gambler’s instinct with a dogged willingness to dig in and trade blows from the baseline. The 29-year-old’s obduracy was never more apparent than on the final point, a gruelling 34-shot exchange that finally ended with a Nadal backhand sailing long.
“That was something special,” said Thompson, ranked 43 in the world. “To beat Rafa in Brizzy, at home in a quarter-final – I think it’s my first semi-final on a hard court as well – I couldn’t be happier.”
While Thompson advances to a semi-final against Grigor Dimitrov, Nadal said he would sleep on his injury before undertaking medical tests if required.
“I need to be open,” said Nadal. “The way I approach everything didn’t change at all. I need to accept everything how it comes. If things happen – if I have one problem there, one problem to the other part of the body – I need to accept.”