Nadal won despite health problems. I was getting whipped, my dad begged me to give up, says Spaniard

If you watched Rafael Nadal’s match with Taylor Fritz in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon, you may have written off the Spaniard as well. He lost the first set and had to get treatment for health problems and it looked like it was all over. But he rose like a phoenix from the ashes for the umpteenth time.

You could see from the beginning of the match that Nadal was not well. He broke his opponent immediately, but at 3:1 something changed. The grimaces and body language made it clear that the best tennis player in history was not in good health.

“The body is fine, but there is something wrong with the abdominal muscles. From 3:1 in the first set, I felt like I was getting whipped every time I served. I didn’t think I could take the match,” explains Nadal.

“It’s true that my dad and my sister asked me to give up. But the energy from the crowd helped me, so thank you for that. It’s not easy to give up in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon,” said the Spanish tennis player.

And he was right. He just about knocked the first set to 3-6. After the set, he limped to the locker room where he received treatment. But the pain injections take time to activate, yet Nadal took the second set 7-5.

In the third set, however, the problems came again and quite strongly. Nadal’s speed of serve was dropping rapidly, he was making unusually frequent errors for his ratio, he also made seven double faults, the most in the tournament so far.

“I had to change my serve to not be so aggressive,” Nadal explained his adjustments to his game. At the same time, he slightly changed his backhand mechanics, which “El toro” played with a strange rotation that often brought errors.

Despite all the problems, Nadal brought the match to a victorious end and in the fifth set in a super tiebreak he completed the turnaround. In the semi-finals, he will face the storming Nick Kyrgios.

Source: Wimbledon, MARCA