Nadal at French Open

Nadal at French Open, Like any conscientious, would-be giant slayer on red clay, Daniel Brands did his due diligence.

Brands, an unseeded German, watched footage of Rafael Nadal’s one and only loss at the French Open, which came in the fourth round in 2009 against Robin Soderling.

Brands hardly needed to review every point to grasp the essential. To have any prayer of beating Nadal in a best-of-five-set match on his favorite surface, an underdog must serve like a demigod, take enormous risks off the ground and convert, and — here’s the really tricky part — stay loose enough down the pressurized stretch to keep finding line after line.

To sum up, a man must deprive Nadal of time: time to react, time to construct, time to believe.

There is a certain liberty inherent in such tactics. If you know that ripping away on just about every shot is the only reasonable option, it becomes easier to accept the tactical fallout, the inevitable errors.

It is also perhaps easier to accept defeat. Although Brands delivered quite a jolt to the tournament and Nadal on Monday in the first round of the French Open by winning the opening set and threatening to take the second, Brands ultimately went the way of everyone but Soderling at Roland Garros.

Nadal is now 53-1 at this tournament, which he has won seven times. But Brands did get the satisfaction of seeing genuine relief in Nadal’s face as they shook hands at the net after Nadal’s 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-4, 6-3 victory.

“I don’t know what he’s ranked, but he can’t be ranked 60th playing like that,” Nadal said. “I can’t believe it.”

Brands is, in fact, ranked 59th, and his high-water mark at a Grand Slam tournament remains his run to the fourth round at Wimbledon in 2010.

“I think if you play against Rafa, you have to play aggressive from the beginning, just try to put some pressure always,” Brands said. “I think that’s the main goal. If you can do this, I think you have a chance to compete against Rafa. But it’s also if you play on the high level always, all the time in the match, I think that’s really exhausting.”

However tiring and compelling, Nadal vs. Brands was not the match of the day on the Philippe Chatrier Court. That was the match that immediately followed between the No. 5 seed Tomas Berdych and the elastic French star Gaël Monfils. A former top-10 player, Monfils required a wild card to play here and is still working his way back in the rankings after a chronic left knee problem. Monfils prevailed, 7-6 (8), 6-4, 6-7 (3), 6-7 (4), 7-5, in 4 hours and 3 minutes.

It was undoubtedly an upset, but in light of Monfils’s ability to rise above at Roland Garros, hardly an earthquake. He arrived here ranked 81st and without a coach, but he was on a roll after winning a challenger event in Bordeaux and reaching the final last week at the main-tour event in Nice.

He missed last year’s French Open, but he was a semifinalist here in 2008 and a quarterfinalist in 2009 and 2011.

“It’s really strange, but as I often say, this place is magical,” Monfils said. “It’s a place where I feel really good. I go beyond myself, get things out of myself that I don’t even think I can. Today, before the match, if you would have told me that I’d play four hours with a score like that, I would never have believed it.”

Berdych, a former semifinalist here who lost only two games in his last match against Monfils, looked none too pleased after failing to complete his comeback in a duel that had a glut of telegenic, power-against-speed exchanges.

“He’s playing at home, and he’s a great player,” Berdych said. “That’s how it is. I mean, really why not to be expecting the highest level?”

More magic may be required if Monfils is to avoid being a one-round wonder this year. He next faces another dangerous floater, Ernests Gulbis, an on-again, off-again talent who gave Nadal another scare on red clay this month before losing in three sets in the Round of 16 in Rome.

Gulbis, like Brands, took the high-risk approach, and he, like Brands, has the height and leverage to deal effectively with Nadal’s trademark topspin that can kick above the shoulders of shorter men, including Roger Federer.

The outsiders who have troubled Nadal most at Roland Garros are well over 6 feet. Soderling is 6-4. Brands is 6-5. John Isner, the only man to push Nadal to five sets at the French Open, is 6- 9.

Isner’s near upset came in 2011 in the first round, but Nadal remains the only one of the game’s biggest current stars to have never lost in the first round at a Grand Slam tournament.

He lost in the second round at Wimbledon last year to Lukas Rosol, who, with the roof closed over Centre Court in the fifth set, also deployed big-bang tactics. Only later did it become clear that Nadal was physically impaired. He would miss the next seven months with a left knee problem, returning in February this year.

Ranked No. 4 and seeded third here, Nadal continues to look less imposing than in his most dominant years. But he looks even more resilient than usual, shrugging off shaky matches and patches and winning six of eight tournaments since his comeback, all but one of which he has played on clay.

It is not for nothing that Nadal has the best record of the current Big Four when he loses the first set, with a career mark of 70-95 (42.4 percent). Top-ranked Novak Djokovic, his biggest threat at the moment, is 68-105 in such matches (39.3 percent).

But coming back from two sets down is a much more daunting prospect, and Nadal was not far away from it with Brands up by 3-0 in the second-set tiebreaker. Nadal’s shoulders were slumping as the winners kept flying past him despite his increasingly manic slides.

“The problem is not the tactic; the problem is the execution that he did very well,” Nadal said. “That was the real problem.”

But Nadal is one of the premier problem solvers in the game’s long history, and the rewards for Brands’s risks would diminish from there. He won the next four points and seven of the next eight over all to salvage the second set.

Two sets later, it was time for someone else to study the Soderling match. Next unseeded pupil: Martin Klizan of Slovakia.

Nadal at French Open 2013-05-27T22:21:00-07:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: My Videos Tube