Rafael Nadal is probably starting to feel sick at the sight of Fabio Fognini. This will be the fifth time both players go head to head this year and the Italian has emerged as one of Nadal´s bête noires having beaten him in Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona and the US Open (after coming back from two sets and a break down), with Nadal claiming his only win in Hamburg.
Before 2015 they had met four times and all four matches went the Spaniard’s way. It seems that Fognini, who is so up and down, finds that motivation that he tends to lack when he faces Nadal and, most importantly, he enjoys Nadal’s looping cross court forehands into his powerful flat double-handed backhand. The speed with which Fognini takes on the ball has seemed to really hurt Nadal this year and we’ve seen in the past how Berdych, James Blake and Robin Soderling all found success against the Majorcan employing a similar strategy of taking on the ball early and on the rise and pretty much fighting fire with fire when it comes to the power behind their ground strokes.
Every match is seemingly a test to gauge exactly where Rafa Nadal’s tennis is right now. The win against Jack Sock which many saw as scrappy and unconvincing was also a step forward for Nadal in terms of recovering from a set down and turning the tide in the face of adversity; which was once his main strength.
Nadal also showed that he can read matches brilliantly as he explained after the match that “I think that in the first set I wasn’t playing very bad, but I was playing three metres behind the baseline. So he was playing with a lot of time, plenty of time to do whatever he wanted with the ball. I think I analysed that well at the right time. I was a little bit closer to the baseline later without losing the court, so he didn’t have all that time to hit his forehand every single time”. This aspect precisely being a key factor ahead of tomorrow’s match up with Fognini. The key will be not giving the Italian too much time to strike the ball and adding enough pace on the ball for Fognini to not be comfortable.
Ahead of this big clash, Nadal said: “He’s a great player, when you play against a great player, especially if you don’t play to your best, your chances are lower. If I am able to play my best tomorrow, I am going to have my chances. If not, it’s going to be tough. It’s simple, sport is simple. The winner is the player who plays better. Fognini played better in the three matches that he beat me”.
The fifth serving of Rafael Nadal versus Fabio Fognini will take place tomorrow in Beijing; a clash with so many intricate details surrounding it that every tennis fan must watch it to try and resolve many of the questions surrounding the Spaniard at this moment in time.
