Ruthless Rafa just too good for poor Tsonga
French favourite is made to feel old
R Nadal (Spa) (3) bt J-W Tsonga (Fra) 6-2, 6-3, 6-2
FIRST he dispatched a rank outsider. Then one of the biggest rebels in tennis.
And yesterday Rafael Nadal came up against the eternal entertainer that is Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and again prevailed to make it into the second week.
As one fan summed it up when shouting to Tsonga towards the end of the third set: ‘It’s not your fault, he’s too good’. All week he has been too good.
Nadal quickly snuffed out hopes among the Centre Court crowd that this match might challenge Thursday’s rip- roarer between Nadal and Nick Kyrgios.
Having fired down two aces in the first game, Nadal remained rock-solid on his serve, winning 39 of 44 points behind it and not giving Tsonga a single break point to work with.
That ruthlessness on serve was no more obvious than when Tsonga was clearly nursing an injury to his hand as Nadal served for the match and he sent down two rockets to seal the match.
The Spaniard was s i milarly pleased by his count of 35 winners, admitting with his usual shrug of the shoulders and broken English: ‘My shots from the baseline, the continuation after the serve, have been very well, playing aggressive, not many mistakes, being very precise.
‘I played a solid match. I played a good quality of tennis. Honestly, I felt very c o mf o r t a b l e this afternoon out there.’
As if winning the match was not enough, Nadal also showed off his balletic side — inventing his own shot when serving at 4-1 in the third set.
In front of a royal box packed out with stars from a range of different sports, Nadal showed off the extent of his athleticism when intercepting a Tsonga lob with a 360-degree spin in mid-air, hitting the ball back in while facing the wrong way.
On the other side of the net, meanwhile, the passage of time and i mpact of i nj ury were s adl y evident.
Returning to Centre Court for the first time since 2016 and with his ranking having plummeted to world No 72, Tsonga showed — much to the disappointment of the crowd — that he is no longer t he f orce of old. Though t he ever- popular Frenchman could certainly still smack his forehand and power down an ace, or 11 in the case of this match, he was simply unable to make the shots he used to find so easy and was let down by an inconsistent serve.
So on prowls Nadal, into the second week for the ninth time in 14 visits to SW19.
And the Spanish left-hand er would not attribute any of his progress this year to a perceived slowness of the courts.
‘For a player who is playing very well they can feel the things perfectly,’ he added.
‘For a player that is not playing that well, they feel slower or too fast because it is difficult to find the timing out there. Honestly, the surface for me is the same as always. I have been playing here since 2003.
‘Honestly, I don’t see a difference on the surface. Is true that sometimes the balls are heavier than the other events here. That’s true. Balls are heavier.’
At the start of the week Nadal had looked up against it with his draw and had moaned about Wimbledon’s ‘not fair’ seeding formula pushing him down to third spot below Roger Federer.
But while he was unsurprisingly made to work against Kyrgios in their four- set tussle, Nadal has enjoyed two easy rounds against Yuichi Sugita — who he beat 6- 3, 6- 1, 6- 3 last Tuesday — and yesterday Tsonga, who he saw off 6- 2, 6- 3, 6- 2. And Nadal has an easier start to his second- week campaign than he would have been expecting.
He avoids a seed in the fourth round.
But in this form, Nadal looks like he could handle just about anyone anyway.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Arthur Fery made it to the second round of the boys’ singles with a 7-6, 6-1 victory over the Italian Matteo Arnaldi.
Fery has sport i n the blood: his mother Olivia is a French former tennis player while his father Loic is a businessman and the president of French football club Lorient.