He has said that he can still crank it up to 125-130 mph on the serve, but he is worried about the first serve % in that scenario.
But the way I see it, he can't just keep hitting serves at 110 mph and rely on his movement and court coverage anymore outside of clay. On grass and hard, he MUST go for bigger serves and keep the rallies shorter.
Well he said the main reason he dropped it was because it was putting a ton of strain on his shoulder. So yeah, it MIGHT get him one more HC Slam or something but at the risk of breaking his body even further. Besides his movement was fine in IW this year, clearly playing on Grass after a lot of matches with little preparation is the problem, not non-Clay in general.
It's not necessarily hard courts that are obviously the issue. It's low bouncing courts where Nadal has to bend his knee to reach balls. Indian Wells was slow and high bouncing. He didn't have any obvious problems there. Of course, Nadal might struggle on hard courts going forward and I expect him to skip those tournaments where he obviously won't have much success (i.e. Cincinatti).
Rafa is done. Give it up with these silly threads. Before today, it was Rafa wins all tournaments this year. Now he is clearly done and needs a new serve? By the way, did anyone DVR this Darcis match? I'd like to watch it 100 times till next Wimbledon. Send it to me. Thanks
No great Wimbledon champion has struggled in the first week of the tournament like Nadal. He just doesn't like that fresh grass where the footing is worse and he actually has to attack, which he struggles to do when his topspin is void by the low skidding bounce.
Nadal started to struggle first week of Wimbledon in 2010, when he struggled a lot in that Philipp Petzchner match. A Medical Time Out strategy helped him out :superlol: Before 2009 he had no problem running on fresh grass.
Well, if you ever played tennis you would know that "bringing back USO serve" isn't exactly walk in the park or a thing you can learn with uncle Toni overnight It takes some time and I'm not sure he can even do it consistently. And if he misses the 1st serve, it puts more pressure on the 2nd serve again.
2010 was sort of Nadal's serving peak.
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