Can Nadal turn Melbourne frustration into inspiration again?

What’s the surest sign that a player is about to make a comeback? When he or she gets a time warning from a chair umpire. It rarely fails to make the offending player feel aggrieved, and to channel that aggrieved energy to good use.

Just ask Marin Cilic. Two years ago, while playing for Croatia in the Davis Cup final against Argentina, he built what looked to be an insurmountable lead over Juan Martin del Potro, only to see it all fall apart when Del Potro, after receiving a time warning, went on a rage-filled run to win the match.

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The Overnight: Can Rafa Nadal turn frustration into inspiration again?

The Overnight: Can Rafa Nadal turn frustration into inspiration again?

On Tuesday in Melbourne, it was Cilic’s turn to be warned at an opportune moment. He was trailing Rafael Nadal 6-3, 2-2, and was down 15-40 on his serve. Chair umpire Eva Asderaki chose that oddly crucial moment to hand Cilic a violation. Cilic complained, double faulted to give away the break, and kept complaining through the changeover. At first glance, it appeared that Nadal, who was now up a set and a break, was fully in charge of the match.

But anyone who knows Rafa’s history at the Australian Open should have known better. This is a tournament where he has lost not one, but two finals after being up a break in a fifth set, and where mid-match injuries—against Andy Murray in 2010, David Ferrer in 2011, and Stan Wawrinka in 2014—had contributed to his defeats on three occasions.

Make that four.

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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.

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The Overnight: Can Rafa Nadal turn frustration into inspiration again?

The Overnight: Can Rafa Nadal turn frustration into inspiration again?

Full Speed Ahead

Can the speed of a single set of courts change the sport? Ask the keepers of the grass at Wimbledon. In 2001, they installed a new, hardier all-rye turf at the All England Club. Out were the traditional low bounces and the bad hops; and so, soon enough, was the serve-and-volley play that had traditionally been used to avoid them. In the 1980s, Pete Sampras transformed himself from a baseliner into a net-rusher specifically to win at Wimbledon. Twenty years later, Roger Federer changed from a net-rusher to a baseliner to do the same thing.

The Australian Open will never have the same game-changing clout as Wimbledon; kids everywhere dream of winning on Centre Court a lot more often than they dream of winning on Rod Laver Arena. But over the last four years, the Aussie Open has gradually sped up its surface, and we’re beginning to see the results.

The impetus was the six-hour 2012 final between Novak Djokovic and Nadal, and the five-hour epic between Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka the following year. For decades, the Australian Open’s courts were the second-slowest of the majors, after the French Open. This year, Aussie pro John Millman said he believes that, especially on a hot day, Melbourne Park has the fastest surface of them all, including Wimbledon’s grass.

The game played on that surface is also changing. In 2017, Roger Federer, a fast-court lover, won his first major in five years in Australia (Nadal showed his adaptability by reaching the final). This year, Marin Cilic reached the semifinals with an ultra-aggressive, 83-winner performance against Rafa; Hyeon Chung attacked intelligently and relentlessly in his straight-set upset of Novak Djokovic; and from the start of his quarterfinal on Tuesday, Kyle Edmund’s powerful serve, bullying ground strokes, and two-handed backhand gave him an obvious advantage over the more varied and finesse-oriented play of Grigor Dimitrov.

This year Edmund and Cilic have powered their way to the semis, and may be followed by Federer and Chung. Compare that to the more defensive-minded semifinal quartet—Ferrer, Djokovic, Murray, Federer—that reached the semis in both 2011 and 2013. The Australian Open’s court speed won’t bring back serve-and-volley, but it’s giving the attacking baseliners a boost.

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That Wow Moment

Count Elise Mertens as another aggressive baseliner who has gotten a boost Down Under. She may have put together the most impressively efficient attacking performance of anyone on Tuesday.

Over the first nine days, there had been no shortage of surprise newsmakers in the women’s draw. We had seen Lauren Davis, Su-Wei Hsieh, Bernarda Pera, Petra Martic, and Marta Kostyuk, among others, take their turns in the spotlight. But Mertens hadn’t been one of them. Now she has outlasted them all.

Maybe we should have seen the 22-year-old, 36th-ranked Belgian coming. She defended her title at the pre-Aussie tune-up event in Hobart, and she won her first three matches in Melbourne in straight sets. But even she admitted that her 6-4, 6-0 blitz of Elina Svitolina on Tuesday was “amazing, I mean, not expected.”

“If you believe in yourself, anything can happen,” Mertens said. “But of course, semis is ‘Wow.’”

Mertens hit 26 winners against just 14 for the fourth-seeded Svitolina. The 5’10 Belgian is long and lean, and she played this match with a ruthless, exciting linearity that robbed her opponents of time. Against Svitolina, Mertens stood on top of the baseline, took the ball early, changed directions any time she felt like it, went down the line as often as she went crosscourt, and instinctively raced forward to cut the ball off and kill the rally as soon as possible. Every shot was hit with the purpose of eliciting an easier one on the next ball.

A Mertens win in Melbourne would be a shock. But if attacking tennis is going to be the coin of the Aussie realm, it would be a fitting one, too.

Watch Madison Keys take on Angelique Kerber in the Australian Open quarterfinals—LIVE on Tennis Channel 7 p.m. ET

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