The aesthetic appeal of Rafael Nadal

It’s all in the feet. If you want to know the difference between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic (or pretty much everybody else on tour) on clay, you’ve just got to watch the two players’ feet as they scamper across the court. Djokovic is an exceptional mover himself, and his court coverage, specially when he’s stretched on the backhand side, looks inhuman at times. But Djokovic’s movement, at least on clay, looks a little mechanical and unnatural – he never looks truly at home while shuffling from one corner of the court to another. Nadal’s clay movement, on the other hand, is something else – a sequence comprised of a Nadal sprint, stop, turn and new sprint looks like the most natural thing in the world. When you watch him take a million little steps to go around his backhand, or slide effortlessly to reach for those wide shots beyond the tramlines, you know you’re watching a man who’s in a league of his own. And today, with his 6-4, 6-3, 2-6, 7-5 win over Djokovic in the French Open final, Nadal has created a league of his own in the record books too – he’s surpassed Bjorn Borg to become the only seven-time champion at Roland Garros in the Open Era.

When the match resumed on Monday – Nadal and Djokovic seem to have made a habit out of playing Slam finals on Monday – most people had come armed with snack bars, energy drinks and a few litres of coffee, expecting the match to go on deep into the Paris evening. It can’t be a Rafa-Nole match unless it turns into an epic marathon, can it? Turns out it can, if they’re playing on clay. Unlike their previous Slam final (the never-ending final in Melbourne earlier this year), the result of this match never really seemed in doubt. Nadal had the upper hand for a major chunk of the match – first he grabbed the initiative by imposing his ultra-aggressive claycourt game on Djokovic, and later he held on to it by hanging in rallies just long enough for Djokovic to make the error. When they came out today, with Djokovic down by two sets to one but leading by a break in the fourth, Nadal looked dialed in from the first point, while Djokovic looked like he had gotten out of the wrong side of the bed. And that was enough for the match to end quicker than everyone expected – Nadal broke Djokovic straight off the bat, held serve easily the rest of the way, and then broke again with Djokovic serving to stay in the match. It was almost like the Nadal camp had actually written the script for the climax, and the players had no option but to act it out.

While Djokovic never really found his best tennis during the match except in the thunderous third set, a big reason for that can be attributed to the fact that Nadal didn’t let him find it. Nadal raced out to an early lead in each of the first three sets by playing close to the baseline and taking time away from the Serb, but then retreated into a bit of a shell while trying to hold on to that lead. Was this the effect of Djokovic “being in Nadal’s head”? Maybe, but even if it was, Djokovic never really took advantage of Nadal’s tentativeness. In the first two sets, he pressed, looking to pull the trigger and end points quickly, but his radar was a little off, and he made a lot more unforced errors than usual. What he seemed to have momentarily forgotten is that even when Nadal is playing reactive tennis, he is so quick around the court that you have to be razor-sharp with your attacking shots – he is going to make you hit an extra shot irrespective of his level of play. Those extra shots went flying beyond the lines a little more frequently than Djokovic would have liked, and before you knew it he was staring down a two-set deficit and we were staring at the prospect of the first one-sided men’s final at a Major in recent memory.

When Nadal broke early in the third set and Djokovic had virtually been driven out of the match, though, something seemed to click in Djokovic’s mind. In a style that he’s turned into something of a trademark in recent times, Djokovic produced his best tennis when everything seemed lost. He seemed to remember how he had won back-to-back clay finals against Nadal last year – by patiently rallying with Nadal and not going for broke until the Spaniard was well out of position – and he broke serve thrice in succession to pocket the set 6-2. The quality of the match shot through the roof, if only briefly, at the start of the fourth set, with the two engaging in a rally containing 44 brutally smacked shots. Unexpectedly, the rally ended on a Nadal error, and all the uncertainties and fears from his last 3 Slam matches against Djokovic seemed to be resurfacing. His serve was broken, and when Djokovic won the first point of the game with Nadal serving at 0-2, you felt that the Spaniard was facing an uphill battle to hold off his rampaging opponent.

But now it was Nadal’s turn to remind himself of something – that he hadn’t built an empire on clay, and proven himself to be one of the toughest competitors in tennis history in the process, out of nothing. He came up with the goods on his serve (as he had done for most of the match), and blasted his way to an assertive hold, staying close to Djokovic in the set. And while we didn’t know it at the time, that proved to be the decisive turning point in the match: play was suspended because of the rain at that point, and Nadal had managed to survive the Djokovic storm just long enough to ensure a level playing field when they resumed. And when play did resume, Djokovic, without the cushion of a big lead, couldn’t survive the pressure of Nadal’s body blows, and was battered into submission a few games later. Talk of the ‘Novak Slam’ had finally been put to rest, and Nadal sank to the rain-soaked clay to savor a victory that was, in many ways, a validation of all of Nadal’s strengths, foremost of which is his borderline ridiculous claycourt superiority over everyone else in history.

After two weeks of sometimes exhausting, occasionally annoying, but for the most part enthralling claycourt tennis, the question needs to be asked: did Djokovic (or any other player) really have any chance at all of denying Nadal his seventh title? The answer may lie in two words: matchup dynamic. We all know that Federer can never truly trouble Nadal on clay with his dainty little one-handed backhand, and that Djokovic’s solid two-hander is perhaps the single most important factor in his recent dominance over Nadal.  Djokovic has learnt to use his backhand to neutralize the threat of Nadal’s vicious, high-bouncing, topspin forehand, thus depriving Nadal of his most destructive go-to weapon. Nadal’s forehand and Djokovic’s backhand are probably the two most outstanding shots in tennis today, and the outcome of the final was always going to revolve around how these two weapons played out. But in a sign that he had done his homework, Nadal decided to unleash his down-the-line forehand, which went to Djokovic’s weaker forehand wing, with something approaching regularity. The surprise element disrupted Djokovic’s rhythm. Not being able to set up camp in his backhand corner, he ended up making way more backhand errors than he is normally accustomed to; his repeated displays of frustration at missing routine backhands showed that he himself was shocked at how unreliable his usually-watertight wing had become.

If the solution to the Djokovic puzzle was that simple, it’s hard not to wonder why Nadal had never used this tactic in their matches before. But there are several reasonable explanations for that. For one thing, the ploy is risky: the crosscourt forehand is possibly the safest groundstroke in tennis, and the down-the-line one, over the high part of the net, can easily hit the top of the net or float wide of the sideline. Expectedly, Nadal’s forehand leaked a fairly high number of unforced errors in the match, at least by his standards. Secondly, you can rob a tactic of its surprise element if you use it to often; true to form, by the end of the match, Djokovic was anticipating Nadal’s down-the-line and inside-out forehands rather easily, and was sending the ball back with interest. But ultimately, the plusses outweighed the negatives for Nadal –  the two-set lead he built by executing his strategy to near-perfection at the start of the match proved too insurmountable for Djokovic, despite his rousing late charge.

Another thing that Nadal did remarkably well was put almost every one of Djokovic’s serves back in play. Despite Djokovic’s (richly deserved) reputation as the fiercest returner in the men’s game, he hit just a few too many of them long or wide, giving Nadal enough free points to eke out several tough holds. On the other hand, Nadal’s unerring, if occasionally short, returns made Djokovic repeatedly attempt expansive follow-up shots, which resulted in more errors for the Serb. Of course, Djokovic’s low first-serve percentage, and surprisingly limp serving on crucial points – he double faulted on break point three times in the match, the last one of which was a championship point – made Nadal’s job a little easier. Still, at the end of the day, Nadal had managed to reverse two significant patterns from their recent Slam encounters – the Nadal-forehand-to-Djokovic-backhand exchanges, and the Nadal-serve-to-Djokovic-return plays. Nadal had not just done his homework – he had made it sing for him.

With the seventh trophy in his bag, is there anything else left for Nadal to achieve on clay? Most people will now agree that he is the greatest claycourter in history. But even if he hadn’t won this record-breaking one – heck, even if he had never won a French Open title in his life - I know I’d still pay to watch him strut his stuff on clay. As he dances around the court, seemingly capable of reaching every last square millimeter of the arena, you are held in a hypnotic grip, mesmerized by his seemingly inhuman speed and unwillingness to let anything get past him.

Rafael Nadal, on clay, is just as aesthetic as any other player in the world. But even if you didn’t agree with that, it wouldn’t bother Nadal too much. He’s in seventh heaven, you see.