The result, despite Rafa’s lapse, was never in doubt, and he ended the day the way everyone expected he would: with his 11th title in Monte Carlo. No one else in the Open era has won the event more than three times; Rafa has now won it five times without dropping a set. The scores of the 10 sets that he played this week went like this: 6-1, 6-3, 6-3, 6-0, 6-2, 6-4, 6-1, 6-3, 6-2.
The last two were his 35th and 36th straight winning sets on clay; as hard as it is believe that he can still set personal records on the surface, that’s a new one for Rafa.
“The margins are small in tennis,” we often hear, but not for Nadal on clay. He can lose confidence in his best shots, miss balls he normally wouldn’t miss and be forced to run from one doubles alley to the other—and still never be seriously challenged. In the semifinals on Saturday, Grigor Dimitrov played some of the best tennis of his life over the first three games, and found himself down 0-3 when they were over. On Sunday, Nishikori broke serve in the third game with a brilliant backhand pass on the dead run. Then he gave the break right back with a double fault.
You can’t play well for a few games against Nadal and think you’re going to be rewarded with any momentum. He forces you to win each point individually, as if the fate of the match depends on every one of them.
This is the seventh season in which Rafa has won his first title in Monte Carlo; in three of those years (2008, 2010, 2017), he went on to finish No. 1. Winning here is about more than just getting his game together for the clay swing; it’s about getting his game together period. Monte Carlo is where everything comes into focus for Nadal, and where he can put any early-season doubts out of his mind. So far in 2018, the doubts have mostly been about Rafa’s health, but the combination of red clay and blue Mediterranean healed him again. By the end of the week, it was hard to remember that the guy criss-crossing the stadium court like a yellow blur was the same guy who hadn’t completed an event since October.
Nadal's Championship Speech:
