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Rafael Nadal's Slump Deepens in Barcelona

Apr 25th 2015

Since the dawn of time, whenever Rafael Nadal sits down to face a group of  glaring reporters, his answers are prefaced by the same pause, the same sigh, the same frown, and the same distractedness as he stares into space or picks up a branded bottle on a table ahead of him. Each and every time, it’s so easy to assume that these are the actions of a man not paying attention to the question or bothered by the query, but then he opens his mouth, and invariably his mind was always there.

For the last four months, this act has never been more accentuated. With every disheartening loss, the sigh comes deeper, the frown sterner, and the answers more candid than ever before.

Rafael Nadal

During these dark times, Nadal has explained his results as a product of nerves. For someone who has become known as one of the most nerveless athletes sport has ever seen, he speaks of them frequently and he scoffs when people attempt to suggest to him that he was born without them. But he had never spoken about it in this manner before falling to Fabio Fognini in the third round of the Barcelona ATP 500 event. He had never conceded that nerves had overcome him, rendering him incapable of fully carrying out his job.

“It's not the question of tennis,” Nadal said a month ago after capitulating against Fernando Verdasco in Miami. “The thing is the question of being enough relaxed to play well on court. [..] But at the same time, (I’m) still playing with too much nerves for a lot of moments, in important moments, still playing a little bit anxious in those moments.”

A month later, back he came to face the music after another bitter loss. The frown and the fidgeting and fiddling came along, too. But this was different. There was an tension to his body, a darker hue to his voice that had never been present before. Losing to Fabio Fognini twice in a row will do that to any person, but this was something more.

Whereas his candor had taken on an honest and introspective form in previous years, this time it was almost as if he was trying to frighten his groundstrokes into action with insults and threats. His game on that day was not merely bad, poor, or errant - it was “vulgar.” When it was time to discuss his treasured forehand as a whole, he all but started a one-man campaign of abuse against his greatest weapon, ending disgustedly with perhaps one of his most memorable quotes.

My forehand was in no way worthy of my ranking and my career,” he spat.

After almost every loss, Nadal has this special, impossible ability to find some positive reference point to build towards and work for. It’s what he does. He’s a problem solver, and even after the coldest, harshest defeats he speaks with near glee at the prospect of “finding solutions” and bouncing back. But the problem seems to be that he doesn’t quite know what it is. After Monte Carlo, Nadal seemed to genuinely believe that he had set himself up on the right track, that there was hope at last. But that’s the problem with hope - when hope fails, it only hurts twice as badly.

As Nadal languished down in the tiebreak against Fognini, his understanding of what he needed to do was so vacant. At one moment, he even began to alternate between aggressively grunting through a point on the baseline, then flying far back behind on the next. It was mirrored off the court, as his explanation of the loss was almost completely opposite to the one told in Miami.

It’s not a matter of anxiety, it’s a matter of technique,” he said. “I’m obviously going to get nervous if I don’t hit the ball the way I should.”

Rafael Nadal

It’s a strange thought for someone so experienced and successful, but perhaps Nadal doesn’t know because he simply has never found himself in a similar position. In the past, his battles have come against injuries, against his unquenchable thirst to improve his game, or more recently against that Serbian guy’s tendency to tear his shirt off.

While Djokovic fell into a sophomore slump after 2008 and even Federer, for a prolific major champion, took a while to piece the puzzle together, the unique aspect of Nadal’s career is that he rode straight to the top of the sport and, barring injury, that is where he has resided ever since. He has had many issues in his career, but his game has never been the root of them. One would expect a game that good to eventually flourish again.

All the while, there's a cruel irony at work as the bookies hesitantly remove Nadal's name from the top of the Roland Garros favorites pile in favour of the world No. 1. In a world where compliments for nine Roland Garros victories in 10 years are beyond the capabilities of human language, finally a justifiable one has come. We stand at an intersection that is both surreal and impossible to have been written, with Djokovic playing the best tennis of his career while Nadal showcases the worst we have ever seen. In this situation involving any other player in the history, the Serb would be leading his nearest challenger by a mile, there would be no conversation to have, and the probability of the defending champion returning to win would not be very good. And yet, and yet, and yet…