MALAGA.- Individuals? Double? Alternate? With the unknown about the role he will play, Rafael Nadal completed with Carlos Alcaraz the last training session before the start of the Davis Cup, his farewell as a professional tennis player, with the host Spain opening the quarterfinals against the Netherlands on Tuesday in Malaga.
Just 24 hours before and for exactly 60 minutes, the Spanish tennis legend and his heir exchanged blows, perhaps for the last time?, on the hard court of the Martín Carpena Sports Palace.
After half an hour of warming up, the ‘almost retired’ Rafa tied 4-4 with the twenty-year-old in a set that they did not have time to finish because they had an hour of court time, showing that he is fit to compete.
On the court, the four number 1s that Spanish tennis has had: Carlos Moyá, in his last week as Nadal’s coach, exchanging impressions with his great friend. On the other side Juan Carlos Ferrero correcting details of the world number three.
And from one side to the other, meditatively, the ‘fifth Beatle’ of the modern era of Spanish tennis, the now captain David Ferrer – the country’s third tennis player with the most ATP titles (27), who will have to decide in the next few hours whether to include Nadal in one of the three qualifying matches (two singles and one doubles, in case of a tie).
‘You have a family’
“90% of my career I have been with Ferrer, (Carlos) Moyá, now Carlos Alcaraz… There are 20 years competing in this Davis Cup with different relationships. In the end you have a family,” Nadal had said hours before in the round. joint press release of the Spanish team prior to the tournament.
Already in the afternoon, before the arrival of Nadal and Alcaraz at the Martín Carpena, the other players of the Spanish team who can be lined up in singles shared training; Roberto Bautista (46th ATP) and Pedro Martínez (41st), who exhibited a very high level to make it difficult for Ferrer. The team is completed by doubles player Marcel Granollers.
Afterwards, the captain observed the slow, but effective roll of the almost forty-year-old Nadal, who ended up exchanging blows at a great pace.
“Bravo!” Alcaraz said when the winner of 22 Grand Slam tournaments returned an almost impossible volley.
In the stands, Nadal’s parents and sister ran behind Rafa Junior, who had just turned two years old, wanting to explore one of the backs of the Malaga pavilion.
At the same time, in a modest adjoining tent, Italy and Poland were playing the first semifinal of the Billie Jean King Cup, but the bulk of the journalists were enjoying one of the legend’s last sessions.
From ‘Let’s go Rafa’ to ‘Thank you Rafa’
The eternal ‘Vamos Rafa’ has definitively given way in Malaga to ‘Thank you Rafa’, a motto distributed with large posters around the sports venue.
Faithful to his principles, Nadal had insisted in the morning that his only objective was to achieve the seventh Davis Cup for Spain, leaving aside the limelight in his farewell.
“I’m going to try to prepare as much as possible. The rest is speculation. It will be what it will be. If I am the one on the track, I will do it with the utmost enthusiasm and determination. Everything else is David’s job,” he said.
“There is no ideal farewell. Those endings are for American films,” he added realistically.
Ahead will be a Dutch team ready to spoil the party. “It’s incredible that it could be the last match Nadal plays in his career. We hope to give him a nice farewell,” captain Paul Haarhuis joked on Sunday.
Ferrer will have up to an hour before the start of the tie to decide who takes to the court. The countdown has begun.
