There was the usual display of how-did-he-do-that shots, including a nothing-but-wrist backhand half-volley crosscourt pass that left the astonished Fernando Verdasco playfully threatening to drop his shorts.
But my guess is that Rafa Nadal would have traded most, or maybe all of those highlight winners in Cincinnati on Thursday for the consistency that he has been searching for, futilely thus far, since he abandoned his post-Wimbledon vacation to get ready for the U.S. Open.
It’s just not there yet. There are flashes of No. 1 form and there’s nothing wrong with his movement. But when you look at him on balance, he still needs a lot of work to regain what is needed to take him to yet another Grand Slam title.
Perhaps the best thing to come out of this narrow win for Nadal was three hours and 38 minutes of desperately needed court time. It only makes sense that the more he plays, the faster his rhythm will return.
This 7-6 (5), 6-7 (4), 7-6 (9) gritty victory over Verdasco, coming on the fifth match point, sends him into the quarters today against No. 7 seed Mardy Fish, who was unbroken in a win over Richard Gasquet. As good as Verdasco can be, the Fish match is going to be tougher. Mardy at age 29 is playing very mature, very intelligent tennis. He is, in short, playing the best tennis of his life.
Where is Rafa lacking?:
* Service returning. He left Verdasco too much too often on second serves. He doesn’t seem consistently confident enough to crack his returns.
* The long rallies: Anything remotely resembling a grinding point is supposed to be about 80 percent Nadal’s. Not on this 90-degree afternoon in Cincinnati, where Verdasco did a lot of the dictating and Nadal did so much running it’s surprising the baseline paint hasn’t worn thin.
* Serving. Very shaky start for Nadal. He picked up his serving considerably at 4-4 in the opening set, then diminished. He not only was broken six times in this match, but was forced to defend 10 break points and twice in the third-set tiebreak failed to cash out the match on serve.
The good stuff? Yes, there was a lot of it and perhaps the best thing about Nadal’s game right now is his fitness level. He looks great and he’s running beautifully. He now needs to purge himself of all those bewildering errors.
Like the first match point, at 6-5 in the tiebreak. With an abundance of time to set up and measure an inside-in drive down the line, he inexplicably clubbed a forehand about 15 feet beyond the baseline, and that measurement is not an exaggeration.
Like the third match point, at 8-7. Simple backhand crosscourt from his right sideline. No blistering pace. Just a safe crosscourt, and it was wide — with the match on the line.
I won’t go into a dozen other perplexing errors. It’s enough to say he has to eliminate those if he’s going to threaten Novak Djokovic in New York.
This was win number two for Nadal since Wimbledon. He had taken out Julien Benneteau 6-4, 7-5 in his opening match at this ATP-1000, after losing his opener at Montreal a week earlier to Ivan Dodig of Croatia. He hasn’t looked dominant in any of these three matches.
After beating Verdasco in all 11 of their previous competitions, I’m sure Rafa knew what to expect, and Verdasco was at his streaky best out there, slamming running forehands that would have made Fernando Gonzalez swoon, followed by forehands that were nowhere near the court. He had 47 winners and 59 unforced errors, most of them off the forehand side.
Streaky, you say? Verdasco was up 5-4 in the first-set tiebreak and looking quite brilliant when he took the balls to, hopefully, serve it out. He promptly snapped off a second serve that was intercepted by the net in front of the wrong box, and it was 5-5. Then, in complete command of a serve-and-volley point, he tapped his volley straight down the middle of the court, allowing Nadal to recover from his return point and crash an easy pass.
But, as you can tell from the score, Verdasco never retreated, even down 1-5 in the final set tiebreak. He got even at 5-5 and fought off four match points, so that counts for something. Serving at 6-7, he forced an error from Rafa. Serving at 8-9, he cracked a forehand winner.
But he never had a match point of his own and about the only thing that will make him feel good about this loss was that he snapped a streak of 11 consecutive sets he’d lost to his Spanish amigo.
You could see the heavy relief on Nadal’s face when this was over. He wasn’t producing any fist pumps or leaps into the air, his usual victory posturing. He looked instead like a man who has work to do and if he wants to build momentum into the Open, he has got to play better than this against Fish.