Canadian world No 14 Denis Shapovalov shocked the Australian Open with an extraordinary outburst, claiming that his quarter-final opponent Rafael Nadal and other members of the so-called “Big Three” receive preferential treatment.
“I just feel like it should just be more even,” said a frustrated Shapovalov after his four-hour, five-set loss to Nadal. “Already on their own they’re so tough to beat and it’s so difficult. But if you give them more advantages, then it just becomes that much harder.”
This was a compelling contest in Melbourne, played out in suffocating 35-degree heat. In the end, Shapovalov narrowly failed to overcome an exhausted Nadal, who was forced to leave the court for medical treatment on stomach issues before the deciding set.
Just to add to the drama, Shapovalov had also become involved in two heated conversations with chair umpire Carlos Bernardes about Nadal’s notoriously slow timekeeping, claiming at one stage that “You guys [the umpires] are all corrupt.”
By the time he reached the interview room, Shapolov was ready to concede that he had “mis-spoke” when he questioned Bernardes’s integrity. But he doubled down on his complaints about Nadal’s slow play, which is largely the result of Nadal’s litany of superstitious tics.
‘They’re legends of the game – but it should be equal for everyone’
“I think it’s unfair, how much Rafa is getting away with,” Shapovalov said. “Does he get preferential treatment? Of course. Hundred per cent he does. Hundred per cent.
“Every other match that I have played, the pace has been so quick because the refs have been on the clock after every single point. This one, after the first two sets it was like an hour-and-a-half just because he’s dragged out so much after every single point.
“Look,” Shapovalov concluded, “I’m not trying to take away anything they [the Big Three] have done. Of course they’re great champions, they’re the legends of the game. But at the end of the day, when you step on the court it should be equal for everyone.”
Nadal later defended himself against all of Shapovalov’s charges, and suggested in the politest possible way that there might be some sour grapes at work.
“I honestly feel sorry for him,” said Nadal after his hard-earned 6-3, 6-4, 4-6, 3-6, 6-3 victory. “I think he played a great match for a long time. Of course is tough to accept to lose a match like this, especially after I was feeling destroyed [physically] and probably he felt that. And then I was able to manage to win the match, no?
“I wish him all the very best,” Nadal added. “He’s young” – Shapovalov is 22 – “and I make a lot of mistakes too when I was younger. Probably he will understand later on, after he thinks the proper way, that probably he was not right today.”
We will come to forehands and backhands later. But the level of intrigue on display in this match – which at one stage found Shapovalov and Nadal exchanging tense words across the net – was unusual enough to deserve a blow-by-blow explanation.
The first of two main flashpoints erupted at the beginning of the second set. Shapovalov – who was waiting to serve – marched up to Bernardes to say “You started the shot-clock 45 seconds ago and he’s still not ready to play. You gotta code him.“ (One code violation for delay of game counts as a warning; a second costs the recipient a point or a first serve, depending on the precise circumstances.)
Shapovalov seemed to be about to drop the issue, but then he began again. “He’s not ready to play! Are you kidding me? You guys are all corrupt!” Bernardes made no response at the time, but this was an unusually forceful outburst, and could well earn Shapovalov a fine for impugning the probity of an official.
Nadal later told reporters that he had needed extra time at the end of the first set to change his clothes, as this was another brutally hot day in Melbourne. Bernardes, he said, had made “a little mistake” by calling “Time” without looking around to check how close Nadal was to being ready.
“In my opinion, Denis was wrong in that case,” said Nadal. “I understand that he just lost the set and in some way he wanted to keep playing quick, but I think he understand, and he gonna understand a little bit later, that normally you have some time to change your clothes.”
Then, one game later, Shapovalov held up a hand as Nadal was preparing to serve. Bernardes was confused and irritated, because the 25-second shot-clock had not reached the end of its countdown. “There’s eight seconds to play,” Bernardes barked. “What do you want? Why you look at me?”
As Shapovalov explained afterwards, he stopped play because he felt like Bernardes was paying attention to the wrong player. “Rafa was serving and I would expect the umpire to be looking at Rafa,” Shapovalov said. “It didn’t make sense to me. The guy is staring me down, so I just looked at him like, ‘Why are you looking at me?’ It was shortly after I had said – obviously, like I said, I mis-spoke – but he was staring me down so I felt like there was some feud or something.”
Now Nadal came forward to the net to speak to Shapovalov directly – an unusual sight in a professional tennis match. “He was just confused,” Shapovalov explained after the match. “He just asked me ‘What happened?’ Then there was no problem. I was just explaining that to Rafa that it had nothing to do with him.”
Shapovalov settled down at this point, and the match continued without further umpiring drama until the fourth set. This time, the shot clock really did run down to zero before Nadal was ready to serve. Bernardes gave him a time-violation warning, whereupon Nadal promptly double-faulted to concede a crucial break, putting Shapovalov on the road to levelling the match at two sets all.
Soon after this, Nadal called the trainer and doctor to the court to treat a stomach problem, which looked to be restricting his movement and energy. He took some pills to deal with the issue, but the momentum of the match was increasingly swinging behind Shapovalov. Soon before 6pm, Nadal left the court for more treatment with the match tied at two symmetrical sets all: 6-3, 6-4, 4-6, 3-6.
As Nadal claimed a second medical evaluation, followed by a toilet break, Shapovalov complained to Bernardes again, saying “When I tried to do that at a different tournament they didn’t let me.” Nadal was off the court for six-and-a-half minutes before he returned, with his mind focused on avoiding a very unusual defeat. He has now held two-set leads in 231 grand-slam matches, and only twice has his opponent come back to win.
“I started to feel not very well in my stomach,” said Nadal during his on-court interview with Jim Courier after the match. “I went inside [and] they checked my body.”
Shapovalov’s confrontational approach did at least suggest that – unlike so many of his peers – he was not here to play the patsy against a member of the Big Three. But his game still disintegrated under pressure when it came to the deciding set. He donated an early break with a series of panicky errors, and never managed to rediscover his inner satnav, despite a series of opportunities.
Nadal was so knackered by this stage of the contest that, when he was receiving serve, he simply struck the return and then stood stock still, reluctant to waste a spare gram of energy on games he didn’t need to win.
Nadal knew that all he had to do was to avoid being broken himself. And he showed all his renowned emotional and mental fortitude to bang down some powerful serves, despite his exhausted state.
It is hard to imagine anyone else pulling out a victory from this position, but Nadal was up to the task. Now he does at least have the advantage of two free days to recover, as this year’s Australian Open schedule has been rejigged so that both men’s semi-finals will be played on Friday.
But the fact that Nadal had not practised ahead of this quarter-final, as he admitted to Courier, suggests that his body is already feeling the strain of playing five grand-slam matches after a long injury lay-off at the end of last year.
To return to the main theme of the day, Nadal had more to say about the question of preferential treatment in his post-match interview. He argued that the introduction of the shot-clock, which the two tours adopted in 2018, had been specifically designed to keep slow players from bending the rules.
“It’s always in the mind that the top players get bigger advantages, no?” Nadal said. “And honestly on court is not true, no? That’s my feeling. I never feel that I had advantages on court, and I really believe that he [Shapovalov] is wrong in that case, no?”