The veteran won the game of emotion and registry easily. In the generational duel between 37-year-old Rafa Nadal and 16-year-old Darwin Blanch, the champion’s battered body got the better of the teenager’s nerves, in his second match in a Masters 1000.
64 minutes
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The boy will do it, without a doubt, but the man of the 80s still doesn’t want to give up, he hasn’t lost the habit of fighting and he buried him mercilessly in 64 minutes, leaving him just one game: 6-1, 6-0.
twentieth participation
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The Manolo Santana was almost full in its 12,000 seats for this emotional first round of Nadal’s last dance in his Madrid. The twentieth participation of the tennis player who has won here the most times, 5, has begun. The first time was in 2004, 3 years before Darwin’s birth.
anticlimax
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Enormous anticipation, and if we want a minimum of anticlimax, because after opening his serve with two aces the boy from Florida who has lived halfway around the world and speaks Chinese and Thai gave in to the emotion. Lots of unforced errors and she quickly headed towards the Balearics.
determined
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Some nice shots that the crowd appreciated, but Blanch, dressed like the ball boys, was never able to shake off the pressure of a historic day for him. Rafa seemed concentrated, compared to Barcelona he served a little harder, from 160 to 180 kilometers per hour, more or less, and above all he seemed ferociously determined. Today was enough, in the future it is not certain.
the bogeyman
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Yes, because now Rafa meets Alex De Miñaur, the Australian from Spain who knocked him out of his Godò in Barcelona last week, and had also surpassed him in January 2023 in Australia. Rafa, upon returning after over 100 days of inactivity in Barcelona, had beaten Cobolli, but lost 7-5, 6-1 to De Miñaur. “He is a difficult opponent who is doing very well at the start of the season,” Nadal said in front of the adoring public, “but a week has passed and I feel better. My desire to do well is intact, we’ll see if it’s enough.”
no evolution
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Answer the day after tomorrow, but in the meantime Rafa has played his sixth match of 2024, and in 2023 he stopped at 5. The indomitable Rafa doesn’t give up, and the Madrid public is ready to support him in his last battle. Today it didn’t help, Darwin didn’t accelerate the evolution of the tennis species, Saturday will be another story. The pace of the last dance picks up.
