Handy for Andy, Innit?
That’s how the tabs spin Rafael Nadal’s defeat today, as good news for the man who might have met him in the semifinals, Andy Murray. As the Mirror puts it:
MURRAY MINT AS NADAL CRASHES
Though my favorite headlines comes from the Independent:
NADAL NADIR
And the *Express*, which plays on Darcis’ ironically fearsome nickname:
A SHARK DEVOURS RAFA
Nadal KO’d by unknown in round one
Over at the Telegraph, Simon Briggs writes that Rafa’s loss shouldn’t have been a huge surprise; coming to Wimbledon he was, “the sporting equivalent of Cyprus, a nation that had borrowed too heavily and was about to face a reckoning.”
Briggs touches on a topic that will probably never go away with Nadal: His schedule. How does he manage it so he’s healthy for every major? It seemed that Rafa would make changes after spending so much of 2012 on the sidelines, but he has basically gone full throttle in 2013, and doesn’t appear to have any regrets about it. He seems to have decided to play what he can, when he can, and rest when there’s too much pain. Wimbledon, as it was in 2009, 2012, and again this year, may always be the sacrifice for that approach.
I know what you're asking: Where do we go for some vintage British poetry-bombast on Rafa’s defeat? The acknowledged king of the genre, Simon Barnes of the Times, was, sadly, on Murray duty yesterday, so we’ll have to make due with columnist James Lawton of the Independent. Lawton should be fine in a pinch. The photo above his column shows him dressed in a sweater, with his knuckles on his chin, looking properly lost in thought.
Lawton gets off to a promising start. Right in the first sentence he lets us know that Nadal has “twice communed with the gods of the game” on Centre Court—in other words, he has won two titles here.
But it isn't until he comes to his description of that heroic underdog, one Steve “The Shark” Darcis, he of the “thinning hair and the baggy pants," that Lawton ascends to misty, Kipling-esque, slightly convoluted peaks:
“Yet sometimes something quite astonishing happens in the lives of relatively ordinary men,” Lawton reminds us. “They have one moment that persuades them that they might just do something that will always be remembered. And then they add to that something with equally remarkable boldness and, then before they know it, they are no longer men from nowhere. They are, like 29-year-old Steve Darcis from Liege, Belgium, men who will always carry more than a little substance right down to the last of their days.”
