Down 2-3 in the second set, Cilic walked onto the court still muttering about his time warning. It didn’t take him long to express his anger with his racquet. He went up 0-30, and after a long game, broke Nadal with a forehand return winner. Commentator Nick Lester observed that Cilic was “channelling his frustration well.” After being content to rally with Rafa for the first set and a half, Cilic finally did what he had needed to do all along: Move forward as soon as possible and pound his ground strokes into the corners.
He would keep that up the rest of the way, until Nadal was forced to retire with a hip injury early in the fifth set. Cilic finished with 20 aces and an eye-popping 83 winners, and he earned 19 break points on Rafa’s serve. It was the best, most confidently potent tennis we’ve seen from Cilic since his stunning second week at the 2014 U.S. Open.
“I was always in that process where I want to keep going with my own game and try to lift up, lift up, keep pushing as much as I can,” said Cilic, who reached his first Australian Open semifinal since 2010. “So extremely pleased with the performance.”
While Cilic moved on, Nadal walked out of Melbourne Park, not for the first time, with a limp. He has only retired from a Grand Slam match once before—here, in the quarterfinals against Andy Murray, in 2010.
“In this tournament already happened a couple times in my life,” a somber Nadal said later, “so it’s really, I don’t want to say frustration, but is really tough to accept...”
Rafa being Rafa, though, it didn’t take him long to begin that process of acceptance.
“I was fighting for it. I was up two sets to one,” he said. “Yeah, just accept, recover, come back home, stay with my people and keep going. Always in the tough moments, even if difficult to think about it, there is so many positive things that happened in my career.”
The Australian Open has been a source of frustration for Nadal, but it has also been a source of inspiration. In 2006, he was forced to skip the event with a foot injury; five months later, when he won the French Open, he took a moment to remember how far he had come after the disappointment of missing Melbourne. In 2010, the same thing happened; forced to retire against Murray in Australia, he again took a moment when he won the French to appreciate how far he had come in those five months. That year he won the next three majors and finished No. 1. In 2013, Nadal was again forced to skip the Aussie Open; again he bounced back and finished the season No. 1.
That may not happen in 2018, but Rafa likes nothing more than to have an obstacle to climb, or some adversity to fight. For him, suffering Down Under usually leads to success down the road.