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Rafael Nadal’s Australian Open Exit Latest Sign Of Grand Slam Decline

By Sean Donnelly
Published on: 22:35 PST, Jan 18, 2016

Rafael Nadal’s five-set defeat at the hands of Fernando Verdasco in the first round of the Australian Open this morning has set in sharp relief the extent of his decline at the top level of men’s tennis and raises serious doubts over his ability to add to the 14 Grand Slam singles titles that he has claimed over the last decade.

After all, Nadal came into this match with a 15-2 head-to-head advantage over his countryman (leading 6-1 in hard-court meetings), and although Verdasco’s record of having reached two last-16s and a semi-final at the Australian Open since 2009 was impressive, Nadal had managed three quarter-final appearances, two runners-up spots, and a tournament victory through the course of his last six Australian Open campaigns.

Indeed, Nadal had beaten Verdasco in a five set semi-final en route to claiming his maiden Australian Open title in 2009, and the fact that the 29-year-old had never lost in round one in at Melbourne Park in nine previous appearances meant that some bookmakers priced him as short as 1/11 to progress into the second-round.

It is testament to the vulnerability that has crept into Nadal’s game over the last 18 months that even at a break up in the fifth, it was not entirely surprising that he went on to lose six games in a row in order to go down 7-6 (8-6), 4-6, 3-6, 7-6 (7-4), 6-2. The reality is that Nadal has been in steady decline since losing in straight sets against Nick Kyrgios in the fourth round at Wimbledon in 2014 and the psychologically frail nature of his defeat to the 32-year-old world No. 45 this morning suggests that we may well have seen the last of Nadal as a consistent winner at the elite-level of ATP Tour.

It must be stated here that Nadal is far from “washed up,” and it might even be hasty to suggest that his hopes of claiming another major can be written off when he has won nine of the last 11 Roland Garros titles and triumphed in 26 of the 32 clay-court matches that he contested in 2015. Indeed, the Manacor native’s record of having won 61 times in 81 matches last season still ranked him as among the most consistent players on Tour, and he reached six tournament finals in 2015, winning three times.

Nevertheless, the Argentina Open, the Stuttgart Open, and the German Open are hardly the kind of silverware that a 14-time major champion would be targeting at the start of a season, a reality emphasized by the fact that none of the players who Nadal beat in those finals – Juan Monaco (53), Viktor Troicki (26), and Fabio Fognini (23) – rank inside the world’s top 20 or have won above ATP World Tour 500 Series level.

Perhaps more revealing is the fact that the higher-profile finals which Nadal lost in 2015 – the Madrid Masters, the China Open, and the Swiss Indoors in Basel – came against Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, and Roger Federer, the triad of players who, along with Nadal, have claimed 39 of the last 43 men’s major singles titles.

These defeats, allied to the fact that Nadal has fallen behind Stan Wawrinka to number five in the world rankings, provide a powerful illustration of the Spaniard’s decline from the level maintained by sport’s elite. Indeed, Nadal lost all four matches that he played against world number one Djokovic last season (as well as in Doha two weeks ago), he lost for the first time ever to Murray on clay and saw a five-match winning streak against the 34-year-old Federer snapped in Basel.

More worrying for Nadal’s hopes at Grand Slam level is the fact that he failed to progress beyond the quarter-finals of any of the four majors last season, and while he could perhaps be forgiven defeats against Tomáš Berdych and Djokovic at the Australian Open and Roland Garros, his round two defeat by American journeyman Dustin Brown at Wimbledon and round-three exit at the hands of Fognini at the US Open were embarrassing.

This morning’s Australian Open exit thus fits into a long-term pattern of decline for Nadal, whose all-action playing style, it has long been speculated, would inevitably deny him the longevity of a Federer. The psychological weakness that the Spaniard displayed in throwing away a 2-0 lead in the fifth further suggests that his confidence has been fundamentally undermined, and in this context, it seems unlikely that Verdasco will be the last lower-ranked player to upset Nadal at Grand Slam level over the next 12 months.

[Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images]

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