Rafael Nadal, the defending champion and top seed of the Australian Open, said he was “mentally destroyed” after suffering another injury setback on his way out of the tournament in his second-round meeting with Mackenzie McDonald.
Nadal bravely battled on until the end of the match after seeming to pop a muscle in his hip area, despite being short of his usual physicality. But he looked to be playing out of respect for the game and his opponent rather than any belief that he could actually win.
Nadal explained afterwards that this latest setback, which found his wife Maria crying in the stands as she watched him battle through the pain, hit particularly hard after going through seven months of previous turmoil due to his foot and abdomen injuries.
“I have history in the hip that I had issues,” Nadal explained afterwards. “I had to do treatments in the past, address a little. Was not this amount of problem. Now I feel I cannot move.
“But I don’t know till I do the test and all this stuff. Is difficult to make a resolution if it’s a muscle, if it’s the joint, if it’s the cartilage.”
Nadal was already finding the going tough when he pulled up awkwardly after striking a crosscourt backhand winner.
He was trailing by a set and a break at the time against world No65 McDonald, a neat stylist from the USA who was making the ball sing with his flat, elegant groundstrokes.
On the next point after the initial injury, Nadal dashed to his left to retrieve one of McDonald’s laser-like strikes, but then had to abort his pursuit of the ball abruptly because of the obvious pain.
He crouched down for a moment at the side of the court, clearly in agony, and after a couple more points called a medical time-out.
As he sat in his chair with his head bowed, waiting for the trainer to arrive, one could only think back to the many injuries that have bedevilled him over the last year, including the so-called “zombie foot” which required a nerve to be desensitised, and two separate instances of torn abdominal muscles.
To his credit, Nadal managed to make the third set competitive by going for quick kills on almost every point. We saw a glimpse of a different player in this period – what Nadal would look like if he were committed to shortening rallies rather than extending them.
But he could only jog slowly from side to side and McDonald eventually asserted himself to claim a 6-4, 6-4, 7-5 victory.
Despite his ropey start to the match, Nadal had felt as if he were beginning to get a handle on McDonald’s slippery game before the injury happened. As he added ruefully, “Doesn’t matter now.”
Could this sequence of injuries threaten to drive Nadal out of the game? “It was not the right moment to have something like this now,” he said. “Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s difficult to accept. Sometimes you feel super tired about all this stuff in terms of injuries.
“Yeah, I can’t say that life is fantastic and staying positive and keep fighting. Not now. It’s a tough day, and you need to accept that, and keep going.
“I really hope that it doesn’t put me out of the court for a long time, because then it’s tough to make all the recovery again. It’s all the amount of work that you need to put together to come back at a decent level. I went through this process too many times in my career, and I am ready to keep doing it, I think, but that’s not easy, without a doubt.”
From the organisers’ perspective, Nadal’s early exit is only the latest blow to an event that has already lost numerous stars including the “Netflix five”: Carlos Alcaraz, Paula Badosa, Ajla Tomljanovic, Nick Kyrgios and Matteo Berrettini.
For Nadal, it also extends his horrific run of form since September’s US Open to seven defeats from nine matches. But his tennis will not be his immediate priority. He will need to assess the damage and work out a rehab schedule that can put him on course for a serious tilt at the clay-court swing he has dominated for so many years.
Nadal’s exit will also be welcome news for other seeds in his area of the draw, including Frances Tiafoe and last year’s runner-up Daniil Medvedev.
Could this sequence of injuries drive Nadal out of the game? “It was not the right moment to have something like this now,” he said. “Sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s difficult to accept. Sometimes you feel super tired about all this stuff in terms of injuries.
“Yeah, I can’t say, lying, that life is fantastic and staying positive and keep fighting. Not now. It’s a tough day, and you need to accept that, and keep going.
“I really hope that [the injury] doesn’t put me out of the court for a long time, because then it’s tough to make all the recovery again. It’s all the amount of work that you need to put together to come back at a decent level. I went through this process too many times in my career, and I am ready to keep doing, I think, but that’s not easy, without a doubt.”
From the organisers’ perspective, Nadal’s early exit is only the latest blow to an event that has already lost numerous stars including the “Netflix five”: Carlos Alcaraz, Paula Badosa, Ajla Tomljanovic, Nick Kyrgios and Matteo Berrettini.
For Nadal, it also extends his horrific run of form since September’s US Open to seven defeats from nine matches. But his tennis will not be his immediate priority. He will need to assess the damage and work out a rehab schedule that can put him on course for a serious tilt at the clay-court swing he has dominated for so many years. Nadal’s exit will also be welcome news for other seeds in his area of the draw, including Frances Tiafoe and last year’s runner-up Daniil Medvedev.
Meanwhile, the Australian Open is running behind schedule. Extreme heat forced players off the outside courts on Tuesday and persistent rain then continued the stoppages.
Henman: This is a nightmare injury
Tim Henman described the scenes as “a sad sight” and said that Nadal’s discomfort looked like a “nightmare injury”.
“Mackenzie McDonald deserves a lot of credit because he was up on that baseline and the one dictating, which was kind of the outcome,” Henman said on Eurosport. “It was horrible to see – we’ve seen Nadal deal with so many injuries during his career but on this stage after his performance 12 months ago, to suddenly pull up… When he pulled up that sharply, we thought the writing was on the wall but McDonald still had to keep his focus and at the end of the day he deserved his victory.
“It’s one of those nightmare injuries. The game is physical for everyone and movement is important but when you get that sharp pain, it’s not good news because you think you’ve pulled something. We were watching and thinking this is not looking good. It’s a sad sight.”
Henman was joined on punditry by seven-times Grand Slam champion Mats Wilander, who believed the type of injury Nadal appeared to suffer was due to a combination of his age and lack of match practice.
“There’s a lot of bad luck involved when you get injured, but you have to look at what happened and Rafa got pushed out to his forehand corner a little too much because of Mackenzie’s inside out forehand,” said Wilander.
“Rafa has to run for it and eventually he gets hurt so in my eyes it’s a technical knockout, probably because we’re watching a man who is 36 years old and hasn’t played enough matches, but it’s down to a lot of bad luck obviously.
“No-one got a hip flexor [injury] in the 80s as the game wasn’t quick enough. There were times when you ran 100 per cent for something but the steps in between shots were never explosive enough to hurt yourself. The game today is so different and it can happen at any time. It’s so much faster and you need to push off immediately and there is a lot of luck involved.”