It wouldn’t feel like there was a grand slam on the horizon without a cloud hanging over Rafael Nadal. Not this year, at any rate.
Unbeaten at the majors this season after winning in Melbourne and Paris before withdrawing from the Wimbledon semi-finals with a torn abdominal muscle, Nadal has established an improbable template for success, overcoming injury and lack of matchplay at critical junctures to leave himself, at the age of 36, on the brink of reclaiming the No 1 ranking for the first time in more than two years.
It has been an extraordinary campaign, even by the Spaniard’s stratospheric standards. But with the US Open less than a fortnight away, he will once again have to go about things the hard way if his season is to continue in that vein. In his first competitive outing since playing through pain to defeat Taylor Fritz at the All England Club, Nadal was defeated 7-6 (11-9), 4-6, 6-3 by Borna Coric in Cincinnati. The loss, his third in five meetings with the Croatian, means his prospects of a record-extending 23rd slam will yet again hinge on his ability to play his way into contention at the eleventh hour.
Nadal, whose defeat has scuppered his chances of unseating Daniil Medvedev at the top of the rankings for the time being, will not have to cast his mind back far for encouraging precedents. He won the Australian Open after missing virtually the entire second half of last season with a chronic foot problem. He won the French Open while managing the same injury with painkilling injections, and having barely returned from a rib fracture suffered in Indian Wells. He won a race against time to make the starting line at Wimbledon after undergoing treatment to deaden the nerve in his foot. At every stage, as his preparations have been truncated, his resilience has been remarkable. Yet the novelty must be wearing thin.
The nature of Nadal’s latest problem makes this comeback especially tricky. Abdominal issues are notoriously difficult to gauge, and he admitted afterwards that he was reluctant to go full throttle on serve for fear of reinjuring himself. Such caution is by no means unique at this point in the calendar. The spate of withdrawals in the women’s draw in Cincinnati – Simona Halep, Amanda Anisimova, Marie Bouzkova and Coco Gauff have all pulled out – is indicative of the reluctance among players to take risks on the eve of a major. Nadal, who has suffered more injuries than most, is a past master of circumspection.
“The last month and a half hasn’t been easy, because having a tear on the abdominal, you don’t know when [you are] 100% over the thing, so that affects a little bit in terms of not [being] sure if you are able to try your best on every serve,” said Nadal, who explained that the injury was “difficult to analyse”.
“When you have a scar, the line is very thin. When the scar doesn’t have enough flexibility, then you feel it. But you don’t know if you feel it because of that, or if [it’s] because something is not going well. So you need to take care in every single moment.
“I am probably going to do some tests after here to confirm that everything stays the way that we want. But that’s it, no? I am positive. I was able to have a week of practice here, trying my best every single day, practising much better than the way that I played today, honestly. Of course it’s better to win, but at the same time, [there] remains one week and a half for me [until] New York.”
The good news for Nadal, assuming that those scans show nothing untoward, is that his difficulties against Coric appeared to be mainly down to ring rust – which is hardly surprising after 42 days without a competitive match. The baseline exchanges were fiercely contested from the outset, and there were no obvious signs of the conservative approach on serve that he alluded to afterwards.
Having seen off a break point in the seventh game, Nadal was just getting the measure of his man when the heavens opened. A lovely change of pace drew an error from Coric as he served to stay in the set at 4-5 but, when play resumed almost an hour and a half later, Nadal’s rangefinder was fractionally off, his exasperation evident as he repeatedly missed lines by millimetres. That will improve with more time on the practice court, as will the lack of sharpness that cost him two set points, the first when he missed an inviting drive volley, the second when he missed a regulation backhand.
Had Nadal taken either of those opportunities, the outcome might well have been different. Instead, he double faulted on the Croatian’s third set point, providing Coric with the platform he needed to join Novak Djokovic and Dustin Brown in the exclusive club of active players who hold a winning record against him.
Nadal could have wished for a less exacting first assignment than a man who had beaten him twice previously, but that is not his nature. The main thing is that he appears, outwardly at least, to be further down the road physically than he has been before any of the slams he has contested this year.
“You lose, you move forward,” said Nadal, who will be bidding for a fifth title in New York. “I know the way. The main thing for me is stay healthy.
“I have to move forward mentally, no? In terms of practice, I need to start to be in a grand slam mode, practising the way that I need to practice to be competitive since the beginning there. I hope I will be able to make that happen.”
If this season has demonstrated anything, it is that Nadal in grand slam mode remains a force to be reckoned with.