The Tspecial One? Not just yet, he’s not. Stefanos Tsitsipas has been the breakthrough star of this Australian Open, but the reality of men’s tennis is that 20-year-olds do not win grand slams.
Having taken out Roger Federer with a magnificently uninhibited performance on Sunday, Tsitsipas went on to say that he wanted to pull off the “complete” tournament by overcoming Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic as well.
It was the sort of thing you might expect this fearless young musketeer to come out with. You feel he would back himself in a cage fight with a hungry lion.
But Nadal put Tsitsipas back in his box on Thursday night, in the short term at least, as he handed out a 6-2, 6-4, 6-0 thrashing in just 106 minutes. This was such a tennis lesson that, when the cameras cut away to Tsitsipas’s 11-year-old sister Elisavet in the stands, she had her hands pressed to her head in despair.
“He has this talent that no other player has,” said Tsitsipas afterwards, in an insightful analysis of Nadal’s game. “He makes you play bad.
“My brain was used to a certain rhythm of the game with all the righty players that I played this week. Him, it felt like I was always on the wrong foot. Didn’t check properly. Felt very slow today, like a 2m 10cm guy that can’t move on the court. That’s definitely not me.”
This is Nadal’s first tournament since the US Open, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he is unloading on every shot like a 36-pound cannon. He and his coach, the former world No. 1 Carlos Moya, spent their elongated off-season working on a plan to lower his workload.
They focused first on his serve, which he remodelled over the winter in the search of more pace and penetration. And then on adding extra bite to the forehand, trying to flatten out the ball’s trajectory – on the most aggressive shots, at least – so that it would zip through the court more quickly.
The results have been spectacular. Nadal might be wearing tape on his abdominal muscles, a sign of lingering concerns over the stomach injury that forced him to pull out of Brisbane at the start of this month. But he has spent only 12 hours on the court to date, and has reached the Australian Open final without dropping a set for the first time in his career.
“After a lot of months without playing, it is probably this court, this crowd, that gives me the energy,” said Nadal, who will surely be preparing himself mentally for a 53rd tour meeting with Djokovic on Sunday. Admittedly, Djokovic still has to overcome Lucas Pouille in Friday’s semi-final, which starts at 8.30am GMT. But almost everyone is expecting another rout to match the one we witnessed on Thursday.
“Of course, Novak is the favourite,” said Nadal on Thursday night. “He’s been in that position so many times. Lucas this is the first [semi-final]. I always thought Lucas is one of those players with amazing potential. It’s true that Novak is unbelievably solid but it’s a tennis match and anything could happen.”
