Tsit Down: Ruthless Nadal routs Tsitsipas in Australian Open semifinal

MELBOURNE—For nearly a fortnight, Stefanos Tsitsipas had thrilled Melbourne. He had thrown himself into his matches, whipped winners in all directions, slain Roger Federer and not so much marched as danced his way into the semifinals. Not only was it unprecedented to see someone from Greece do so well, it was even more refreshing for a tennis player to address the world in such a refreshing, philosophical manner.

Tuesday night, following his quarterfinal win over Roberto Bautista Agut, Tsitsipas said of the YouTube channel he’d created, “When I'm desperate sometimes, when I feel down, I do these videos, I actually feel better. It makes me realize that tennis is not the most important thing in life, that we all have some other talents that we don't know about. It kind of makes me more relaxed.” The Tsitsipas sensibility hinted at alluring possibilities—a win over Roger, followed by a win over Rafa?

“He's with confidence,” Rafael Nadal had said prior to this evening’s match. “He won a lot of good matches. Will be a tough one.”

How it works with Nadal, though, is that if he respects you, he kindly reserves the right to annihilate you. This evening, Nadal made Tsitsipas experience the one quality the man from Spain believes is most important for any ambitious tennis player: the capacity to suffer.

Over the course of one hour and 46 minutes, he demolished Tsitsipas, 6-2, 6-4, 6-0. It was one of Nadal’s finest hard-court matches, borne out by such stellar numbers as 28 winners (to 14 unforced errors), 18 of 22 at the net and fighting off the one break point he’d faced, an occurrence that only happened when Nadal served for the match at 5-0 in the third.

After his win over Federer, Tsitsipas was a happy warrior. Tonight, Tsitsipas was equally thoughtful in defeat—upset but not angry, dismayed but not distant, perturbed but not petulant.  Most of all, he was dazed, the same quality he’d felt for most of the match.

“I really wanted badly to wake up,” said Tsitsipas. “I felt like my reaction time was very slow. I felt like everything was not that alert like it usually is. I felt a bit down. Just a click worse than I'm usually.”

Be off a click versus Federer and you will occupy the studio while Roger wields his paint brush. Be off a click versus Novak Djokovic and you will still hit plenty of balls, even as you lose points. Be off a click versus Nadal and you will feel it right where it counts.

“I felt kind of empty in my brain, which is strange, because I never feel like this when I'm in the match,” said Tsitsipas.

In the first set, Nadal broke Tsitsipas at 1-2 and then proceeded to lose just one point on his serve, claiming the opener, 6-2. Nadal credited his improved serve for making it easier for him to play aggressively, an asset that helped him lose just four points on his delivery in the pivotal second set.

“He gives you no rhythm," said Tsitsipas. "He plays just a different game style than the rest of the players. He has this, I don't know, talent that no other player has. I've never seen a player have this. He makes you play bad. I don't know. I would call that a talent.”

Ah, Tsitsipas, still wed to the lover’s idea of competition, of the stylish artist who does not fully grasp that making the other man play poorly is the object of any game. Is Nadal supposed to help Tsitsipas play well? As Nadal explained, terms such as defense and offense do not do justice to an athlete’s mission.

“The problem with myself is because I had a lot of success on clay, people probably think I am not aggressive,” he said. “I really believe that people thinks that are completely wrong. That's the real thing, no?

"Of course, I am not doing serve and volley. I am not hitting winners every ball. But I play all the shots with a goal. There is not better way to be aggressive than hit every shot with the goal to create damage on the opponent.”

Nadal also addressed another aspect of his career he felt has been misperceived. We wish to create a storyline in tennis of Nadal’s vivid procession from teenaged baseliner to all-court attacker. Now different, theoretically better, we want Nadal’s techniques and tactics to feed our desire for narrative elements.

But Nadal tonight resisted the application of plot line to his career. To him, the competition is simply one moment, beginning with what happened in 2005, when at the age of 19, Nadal suffered a foot injury that threatened to end his career.

“We can't say now I am playing better than never, no,” said Nadal. “I did a lot of things well during my career. Today I have to adapt my game to the new time and to my age, that's all. That's what I did during all my career, just try to adapt my game with the circumstances that I went through. That's the only reason why at this moment I still here competing at high level.”

As T.S. Eliot wrote in the poem, Burnt Norton, “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.  And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”

But then again, isn’t adaptation the cornerstone of evolution? “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives,” wrote Charles Darwin. “It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

As Stefanos Tsitsipas learned in brutal fashion this evening, Rafael Nadal remains tennis’ premier survivor.

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