It is, arguably, not just the biggest test in clay-court tennis, nor even in men’s tennis across all surfaces. The record of Rafael Nadal on the red dirt of the French Open may just have become the biggest test in tennis this decade.
Nadal played his first French Open when still a teenager in 2005, and won the title. Now playing for the 10th consecutive time at Roland Garros, he has still lost only one match out the 65 he has played—to Robin Soderling in the fourth round in 2009—to amass a record eight French titles. Needless to say, should he win again this year, he will extend that record to nine, a tally that no other man has managed in any other Major.
For when it comes to clay, Nadal is in a league of his own. Forty-four of his 63 titles have come on terracotta, two of them this year already.
And if all that was not enough for Andy Murray to consider, the other factor in the scales of this particular semi-final in this particular French Open was that the Briton had not once, in 42 finals, reached one on clay. The odds of him doing so this time were, it was probably fair to say, not good.
This would be their 20th meeting, but only their second at Roland Garros. For, as Murray pointed out ahead of their recent Rome meeting, their long rivalry had panned out in a very uneven way.
“We used to always get drawn on the same side of the draw.” That was certainly the case in a remarkable 10 consecutive cases: For two and a half years. Between the quarter-finals of Wimbledon in 2008 and until the Tokyo final in 2011, they had met 13 times and all but one was in a final or semi-final. Then it would be another two-and-a-half years before they played one another again on any stage—it turned out to be Rome last month—and it was a match that proved not only Murray’s return to form and fitness after back surgery last autumn but also his considerable ability on clay.
He may never have beaten Nadal on this slipping, sliding surface, but he did dominate the Spaniard for half of the Rome match—much as he had done against Djokovic at the same venue in 2011. And he subsequently explained that it had been a valuable experience ahead of two back-to-back Grand Slams:
“I definitely learned some things in that match. It was quite clear in my head what was working and what wasn’t. It is obviously different conditions here and a different court, different balls and stuff. When we played in Rome it was extremely cold, it was raining and it was wet. I have been told it is meant to be 25 or 26 degrees on Friday.
“So conditions change, which makes a match slightly different. But there are some things I learned that hopefully I can use to my advantage.”
He was certainly right about the weather. Semi-final day dawned sunny and, as these two took to court in mid-afternoon, the temperature was higher than at any time during the tournament. And Nadal was set to make hay while the sun shone.
The balls swung and soared from the court with his infamous top-spin, the Nadal serve kicked, and his forehand pounded down the line with its unique trajectory. The uncertain Nadal from earlier this season, the one who made unexpected exits from his beloved Monte Carlo and Barcelona in the quarter-finals, was banished to history. This was Roland Garros, where Nadal has reigned for a decade, and the signs for Murray were ominous.
Right off the bat, Nadal broke in the second game. He held in the third with three forehand winners, and would go on to score 15 out of 17 first serves and notch up 11 winners for just seven errors to march with little trouble to a 6-3 set in 34 minutes.
And if the speed of the Nadal advance was not enough to ring alarm bells—the explosive Spaniard is, conversely, one of the slowest players between points—then the second set had them clanging all across Paris.
He opened with a love service game, and would go on to win every point on his first serve, a staggering 14 out of 18 deliveries. Meanwhile, Murray was only scoring 40 percent of his first serves, and began to berate himself for lack of “legs”—perhaps a hang-over from his very late five-set win over Gael Monfils in the quarters. It is worth remembering, too, that he had also survived a third-round, four-hour match spread over two days, winning 12-10 in the final set.
Nadal was moving superbly now, manipulating Murray with ease—and wrong-footing him time and again—to break in the third game. Nadal kept his foot down, controlling from the baseline and happily taking a smash here and there for good measure.
He closed out a 3-1 lead with an ace, his 12th point in the last 15, and broke a floundering Murray again in the seventh courtesy of three errors. It took just 31 minutes for Nadal to serve out the set, 6-2.
The balance of power remained unchanged in the third: Still Murray’s serve hovered at 44 percent while Nadal would go on to lose only three points on serve in the set. Murray faced a break point in the third game, which Nadal smashed away for a huge winner, and Murray would not win another game. Two more breaks, and Nadal was into his 20th Grand Slam final, his ninth in Paris.
It was, in truth, a surprisingly one-sided contest, and by the conclusion, the Philippe Chatrier crowd were restless, throwing in an extended Mexican wave to liven things up. Murray could manage only half the points scored by Nadal through the match and he worked not a single break point, whereas Nadal converted all six of the opportunities he earned.
Still, then, no Briton has reached the Roland Garros final during the Open era, and only two have done so in the entire international history of the tournament dating back to 1925.
But it sets up the clash that most fans in Paris and across the tennis world had hoped for between the two top ranked players in the world.
They will meet for a remarkable 42nd time and the result of their third match of the year is heavy with import. The winner will be world No1 ahead of Wimbledon; Nadal will become equal second in the list of Grand Slam champions, equalling Pete Sampras’s 14; Djokovic will become just the eighth man ever to complete the career Grand Slam.
Their first meeting came at Roland Garros eight years ago: Djokovic retired after losing the first two sets. The most recent meeting at Roland Garros was one of the matches of the year last season, a five-set thriller led by Djokovic until an accidental touch of the net in the final set.
This time, perhaps it is the Serb’s time… but then Nadal confessed after beating Murray, that this was probably his best tennis of the tournament. As champions so often do, he is peaking just I time for the climax.