The Top Matches of 2016: No. 9, Pouille d. Nadal (U.S. Open)

The U.S. Open reached its peak over the Labor Day holiday weekend, and the 2016 tennis season may have as well. On Friday, the tournament delivered our 10th-best match of 2016, Stan Wawrinka’s third-round win over Dan Evans, which took four hours and two minutes. On Saturday, Lucas Pouille and Rafael Nadal traded missiles for four minutes longer. Pouille’s 6-1, 2-6, 6-4, 3-6, 7-6 (6) fourth-round win comes in at No. 9 on our year-end list.

Tennis players like to say that their sport, a challenge to body and mind in equal measures, is the toughest in the world. Watching the 33 minutes of highlights between Pouille and Nadal above, it’s hard to argue with that assessment. The two men hit and run, hit and run, and keep on hitting and running, but neither falls down or gives in. Between them, Nadal and Pouille cracked 111 winners and covered six miles. Yet even after all of that, there was nothing that separated them: Each won 156 points.

Here’s a look back at a generational clash where the NextGen era got the better of the Big Four era. That’s something we should be seeing more of in the near future.

—Judging from these clips, it’s hard to believe that Nadal lost the first set 6-1 in just 28 minutes. He’s hitting pretty well, especially from the backhand side. In general, I think he hit his backhand as well in 2016 as he ever did in his prime. It was the serve and forehand, obviously, that were problematic.

The biggest problem for Nadal in 2016 was that his opponents, like Pouille, had the answers to his game. The 22-year-old Frenchman came into his own in 2016. He moved from No. 78 at the start of the year to No. 15 by the end, and showed that he’ll be a threat on all surfaces. He reached the quarters at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and the semis in Rome.

Pouille also has all of the classic attributes of a Rafa killer: The height—Pouille is 6’1”—the two-handed backhand that he can flatten out, the putaway forehand and the strong serve. (He hit 11 aces in this match.) Pouille made just 46 percent of his first serves in this match, and he doesn’t have the biggest delivery among the NextGen-ers—Nick Kyrgios and Alexander Zverev have more power, and Dominic Thiem has more kick. But I like Pouille’s motion, which takes him well into the court, and his slider up the middle in the ad court is devastating.

Most important in this match, Pouille had eight years on Nadal. Pouille was able to start points far behind the baseline, yet also get to the net 63 times. This was his third five-set match of the week, but he was all over the place.

—Still, while Nadal may not have been ready for Pouille’s game at the start, he was ready for a fight. He loosened up on his forehand, started using his wide serve well and eventually won 35 of 48 points at the net. Both guys came up with all kinds of great shots in this one, but Nadal punctuated his comeback with an especially brilliant sharp-angle half-volley winner. Rafa, who had lost a crushing five-setter to Fabio Fognini at Flushing Meadows the year before, was even more fired up than usual for this one. And the Saturday afternoon crowd in Ashe Stadium responded. With Roger Federer absent, Rafa was the sentimental favorite on the men’s side.

—For better and worse, this match was a fitting summation of Nadal’s last two seasons. If you’ve been paying attention, you know what that means: In the recent tradition of fellow 30-something legends Lleyton Hewitt and Venus Williams, Rafa now has a habit of roaring from behind to take a lead, only to lose it in the end. Most troubling at these moments is that he can’t seem to find the balance between aggression and margin; when Nadal isn’t being overly conservative, he’s being reckless.

You can see that here at 4-3 in the fifth set. Rafa had led 4-2, and was now serving. At 30-30, with a chance at a short forehand, he tried a drop shot instead and popped it up. Then, at deuce, he tried to do something he almost never does: Serve and volley. Pouille broke, and the two headed for what this match deserved: a final-set tiebreaker.

There Rafa channeled Hewitt and Venus again: He battled back from 3-6 to 6-6, saving three match points. Then, after maneuvering the next rally into his favor, he pulled a sitter forehand into the net. It looked to me at the time as if he changed his mind at the last second; the inside-out forehand would have been his normal play in that situation. But those match-on-the-line situations no longer seem as straightforward as they once did for Rafa.

“It was the best atmosphere I played on a center court,” said Pouille, who was making his Ashe debut. “Sometimes I couldn’t even hear myself when I was saying, ‘Allez, allez, allez.’”

“I need something else,” Nadal admitted afterward.

He was thinking about this loss and others from 2016.

“I need something more that was not there today,” the 14-time Grand Slam champion added. “I [am] going to keep working to try to find [it].”

Is it a 22-year-old body and mind, and sense of fearlessness, that Nadal is looking for? Can he find those things again at age 31 in 2017? If he keeps giving us matches like this one, it will be worth the search.