Nadal gets serious, despairs Carreo and plays his first final of the year against Tsitsipas

One of the countless things it has shown Rafael Nadal Throughout his extraordinary career is how he grows as difficulties increase and tournaments progress. In view of Pablo Carreo, sixth seed, by far the most qualified rival he has had in this edition of the Count of God, offered his most recognizable image, that of an intimidating tennis player, firm in the back of the court, capable of dominating the rallies with solvency. and of rowing until exhaustion when it was his turn to defend. Ace escaped early on the scoreboard, against an opponent who was sweating blood to win a point. Recent champion in the ATP 250 in Marbella, the Asturian has lost in his eight appointments with Nadal and never took a set from him on clay.

Nadal won 6-3 and 6-2, in one hour and 29 minutes, and will play this Sunday (4:00 p.m., La1) against Stefanos Tsitsipas in the Conde de God his first final since last October he won the thirteenth title of Roland Garros to equal the 20 greats of Roger Federer. The Greek won by a double 6-3 to Jannik Sinner and he appears in the final match in perfect magazine condition: he has just won his first Masters 1000 in Monte Carlo, without giving up a single set, a record he has maintained in Barcelona. He has the plus of having lifted two sets against Nadal in the quarters of the last Australian Open, in the most recent confrontation between the two, although in the head-to-head he is 6-2 down. This is how the 2018 final is repeated, easily resolved by the host.

Carreo vein of three sets we hard against Diego Schwartzman, from a game in which he remained to survive and that ended around nine o’clock on Friday night. Nadal indulged in a brief training session after achieving against Cameron Norrie the simplest victory of the tournament in a match that ended three hours before the Asturian. But the distance marked by Nadal had little to do with the wear of both.

Ephemeral resistance

Carreo had to take extreme risks to try to destabilize his adversary and he rushed on many occasions or lacked the necessary precision. A strange game, the seventh of the first set, allowed him to clean up the scoreboard after the Manacorian missed a shot spectacularly and gave up his serve with a double fault. This circumstance gave Gijons slight wings, which then won their serve in white and threatened three times to break the left-hander again and reach 4-5. Nadal neutralized them and took the set, not without first seeing how he began to find greater resistance on the other side of the net, everything, from that point on. smash wrong.

The stake was fleeting. Erected in an unapproachable tower in the face of Carreo’s attacks, Nadal continued to conquer ground. He got away like a shot in the second set and completed his best game of the dirt tour. The Asturian only had to nod, resign himself to seeing a player pass already with the works that have made him the best tennis player on earth, a man willing to relativize the stumble in the Monte Carlo quarterfinals and try to settle accounts with Tsitsipas, the player more regular so far this year, earning its twelfth Earl of God.