A few days after bidding a fond and sad farewell to Fernando Gonzalez, it’s good to be reminded that there are still plenty of players of his vintage lighting up the courts — in this case Radek Stepanek, two years Gonzalez’s senior, who played some good and entertaining tennis in his third-round match tonight. Unfortunately, he was facing Rafael Nadal, who took a little under 90 minutes to beat the Czech veteran 6-2 6-2 to move on to the Sony Ericsson Open fourth round.
A combination of a slow start from Nadal and a good performance from Stepanek meant that the latter did have his chances, albeit few and far between. In windy conditions, Nadal’s serve was slow to warm up and he initially failed to get the ball enough to Stepanek’s forehand, allowing the Czech to use his stronger backhand to work Nadal off the court and earn a break point in Nadal’s second service game. It was saved with perhaps the most shining feature of Nadal’s game tonight, a passing shot from inside the baseline, and Stepanek missed another mini-opportunity in the next game by netting a mid-court backhand. At 2-3, Nadal started to target the Stepanek forehand and broke with another passing shot, his proficiency with that tactic effectively defanging the strongest part of Stepanek’s game.
It’s a truism that in a best-of-three match, the play can get away from you almost before you realize what is happening and once Nadal got the bit between his teeth, that was precisely the case. With Stepanek behind 2-5, Nadal had won 13 of the last 17 points; minutes later, he led 2-0 in the second set and had won 12 of the last 17. By that point, Stepanek had missed his best opportunity of the set, when he earned a break point on Nadal’s serve at 0-0. Nadal’s first serve was out (as the TV replay showed) but not called, and Stepanek’s failure to challenge meant it was recorded as an ace; a salutory lesson, perhaps, in the ill-advised nature of the kind of injudicious challenges Stepanek was making in the first set. The Czech continued to play lively points appreciated by the early-evening crowd, but Nadal was on the home stretch and broke Stepanek’s serve again at 2-5 to seal the match.
Overall, it was something like watching one man with antiquated weaponry going up against another with the latest artillery as Nadal pummelled Stepanek’s forehand, served better and more unanswerably as the match progressed and continued to come up with the kind of laser-guided passing shots which one rewinds and watches again and again. The fact that it was not Nadal’s best performance did not detract from the one-sided nature of the Spaniard’s sixth win over his older opponent and will not encourage his next opponent, Kei Nishikori, whom Nadal beat on his way to the final of this tournament last year.