It was long, it was close, it was competitive, it was up and down and back and forth and you didn’t know until the last ball clipped the net who was going to win. But that doesn’t mean Rafael Nadal’s 6-2, 3-6, 7-6 (3) win over Mardy Fish should be sent off in a time capsule for the viewing pleasure of future tennis fans. This round-robin match was many things, but it wasn’t pretty.
Fish, playing in his first World Tour Final, was nervous and nearly immobile to start. In the opening game, he made two ugly backhand errors to be broken. In the next game, he failed to react to two short balls from Nadal. When Nadal served at 2-1, Fish let him get away with two short, slow, ready-to-be-pounded second serves. Nadal, who hadn’t played a match since October and who isn’t known as a fast starter himself, couldn’t have asked for a better beginning. Tentative in the early going—he answered Fish’s early nerves with his own shanked backhands—by the middle of the set Nadal was running Fish with his inside-out forehand and foiling his advances to the net with some severely dipped passing shots. More than anything else, his high-kicking spin—on topspin shots, at least, this court doesn’t seem to play as low as advertised—was giving Fish fits. As Tennis Channel commentator Jimmy Arias said, there’s no way to practice for that stuff.
But there was also little chance that Fish, whose forward-moving game is built for this surface, wouldn’t put up more of a fight in the second set. He was looser and more aggressive from the first game, while Nadal immediately tightened up. He double-faulted at game point and let Fish beat him at his specialty, a long baseline rally, to go down 0-2. Soon Fish was whirling forward whenever possible, carving under backhand drop shots and cutting forehand volleys at delicate crosscourt angles. By the time Nadal served at 2-5, Fish was even using his backhand to push Nadal around on his forehand side. The serve and volley was the American's go-to play throughout, and he used it to save a break point at 5-3 before closing out the set. If you’re looking for a stat to demonstrate the shift in this match, look no farther than Fish’s winners and errors. In the first set, he hit three winners and committed 16 errors; in the second, he hit 16 winners and made four errors.
By then Nadal looked pale and drained; with his hair stuck to his forehead, the word "haggard" came to mind. We soon found out why. After breaking serve with a line-smacking forehand pass for 0-2, he took that inopportune moment to run to the bathroom—afterward he said he had “pain in the stomach,” and it was reported that he threw up during the break. Whatever happened, Fish quickly broke, then broke again for 3-2. Judging from their physical appearance, it seemed that Fish was ready to run away with it. But coming into the event, the American had wondered whether he belonged in this only-the-best-will-do tournament, and his doubts manifested themselves once he had a lead. Fish was broken at love.
Credit him for not going away after that. Fish held off two match points at 4-5, and in the deciding tiebreaker he got from 1-4 to 3-4 with a massive kick second serve and a brave forehand winner that caught the line. But even against a rusty and struggling Nadal, that was as far as Fish seemed to think he could go. He ended the match the way he had begun it, by putting a forehand ground stroke and a backhand volley into the net. In the end, it was a mixed result for Fish. He hit a lot of brilliant shots—I’ve never seen so much touch from him—and he lifted himself out of his early nerves and began to play the way he needed to play. But this was a match he should have believed he could win.
As for Nadal, from his condition to his game, he was in survival mode throughout. Amidst the many shanks and short balls, he hit his forehand on the run well, he came through with his backhand return on big points, and he played the tiebreaker exactly the right way—by staying safe and leaving it up to the World Tour Finals rookie to win it or lose it. Beneath the sickness, the rustiness, the errors, and the nerves, the Nadal we know is in London.
—Steve Tignor