No signs that Nadal is ready to check out any time soon
A photograph was doing the rounds yesterday which hinted that Rafael Nadal is no different from the rest of us. There he was snapped looking baffled by a self-service checkout at the Wimbledon branch of Tesco. We’ve all suffered like him, failing to address bagging area decorum.
But Donald Young will have confirmed that when it comes to tennis, there is nothing remotely normal about Nadal. As the former Boys’ Champion here will assert, this is a player approaching the very peak of his form, magisterial in his work, a champion in waiting. Nadal beat the world No 43 in straight sets, 6-4, 6-2, 7-5, with a straightforward dispatch that, at times, was contemptuous. Except contempt is not a word that should ever be used in association with the ever-respectful Spaniard.
It has long been a myth to suggest Nadal cannot cope with grass. What he has struggled with is the pristine greenery in the early stages of Wimbledon. But this week the weather is perfectly suiting the great clay-court master, the grass shrivelling up before our eyes, the ball bouncing higher as the surface bakes. It has long been the case the longer he can stay in the SW19 tournament, the more potent Nadal becomes. And this week he is already looking potent. The way he scampered around court with puppy-dog enthusiasm insisted this is a man on a mission to equal Bjorn Borg’s achievement of winning a seasonal double of French Open and Wimbledon for a third time.
To reinforce his sense of purpose, he broke Young’s serve in the very first game, and from there set a pattern which barely wavered: his own service games were won with nary an interruption while every one of Young’s services were challenged in a flurry of deuces.
He broke him in the first game of the second set too, as if to reinforce the chasm in class. And while Young managed to hold his own at the start of the third, and indeed break Nadal for the first time as he was serving for the match, it was never enough.
There were times when Young looked at the space between where he was standing and where Nadal had just fizzed the ball and wondered how on earth he had not got there to meet it.
And when the American threatened parity, Nadal would narrow his eyes and give full rein to his unfathomable competitive instinct with a thumping winner, fired with a particularly voluble growl. This is the difference between the best and the rest: Nadal simply refuses to countenance defeat.
“I am happy now, back in the third round without losing a set,” he said. “The last couple of years I miss being in the third round.”
There he will play the Russian Karen Khachanov. In this sort of mood, you suspect the tills at Tesco will give Nadal more trouble.