“Was a big mistake”, he said. I’m trying to not put pressure on myself because I know I have to win few more matches to reach the number one.
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But nerves also got to Nadal, who netted a routine forehand to give Pouille one final match point, which he clinched with a forehand blast down-the-line from behind the baseline. And when he arrived for his press conference, he looked like he wanted to take a battering ram and beat everyone around him to death with it.
Nadal had been gaining momentum coming into the match.
Of course, it all could have turned out differently. Pouille could have not produced his best tennis exactly when it mattered, and could have missed one of his groundstrokes while being in danger of getting broken at 4-4 in the fifth set.
“I fight until the end”, Nadal said after his five-set loss to Lucas Pouille. I was a break down in the fifth, I came back and led 6-3 in the tiebreak and he came back. Is a question of play (ing) a little bit better than what I did. “So I was ready for it”, said the Frenchman.
“Mental or physical doesn’t matter. I going to keep working to try to find”. Can he add to his collection of 14 grand slam titles?
In the women’s draw, Petra Kvitova and Angelique Kerber duked it out over an hour and 28 minutes, with the German emerging victorious in straight sets to reach the quarter-finals at Queens for the first time since her breakthrough run to the semi-finals in 2011.
The 30-year-old was sad that he squandered an opportunity to do something special at the US Open, but happy with his effort and prospects for the rest of the season.
“When it’s happen it will be fantastic feeling because that was also one of my dreams”. Nadal fired back at a reporter who noted that the Spaniard’s results at the majors have been weaker than at regular tournaments recently, which might perhaps mean he is feeling more pressure at the slams. To see that after a long career, all the success he has, it was great to see this.
It’s the first time since 1947 that three French men have reached the quarter-finals of one Grand Slam.
As Nadal pointed out, the match should have never reached that stage.
The forehand errors in the tiebreaker were, in the simplest of terms, completely un-Rafa-like. He lost the third set, too, and blew a break in the fifth set, and there he was in a fifth-set tie-breaker.
If only we had the wisdom of Nadal himself. “That’s it. You can not go insane thinking about these kind of things”. Then he staved off a trio of match points.
That’s it, indeed. Pouille was sensational, Nadal wasn’t at his best, and Arthur Ashe got to witness the flawless storm – sport in a nutshell, in other words. There also seems to be a breath of fresh air on tour courtesy talented youngsters like Grigor Dimitrov, Dominic Thiem and David Goffin who look promising to take over the mantle of the game from their more illustrious counterparts.
“I had a lot of injuries”. But, you know, he’s like every players.
Thta’s a depressing way to put a cap to Nadal’s 2016 US Open campaign, and at times like these you really wish the players could take a peek inside the fans’ heads.
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Small consolation for a great champion like Nadal, but something is better than nothing, no?
