Rafael Nadal was back on the Manolo Santana Centre Court to play his third-round match against US player Sam Querrey. The Manacor native only needed two sets to see off his opponent (6-4, 6-2) after one hour and ten minutes of play. Despite the result, Nadal had to come back in the first set after a great start from Querrey, who broke the Spaniard’s serve early and took a 4-1 lead.<\/p>\n
Nadal, playing in a night session for the first time this year, spoke about how he found it: “It’s a different feeling. During the warm up I felt a bit strange”. The Mallorcan needed a few games to adapt his tennis to the conditions, but once he did so it was one-way traffic. “When you lose a lot of points early on, you always start to doubt yourself. So I decided to make a couple of changes and return a few metres further back and it worked”, admitted Nadal.<\/p>\n
“I knew that if I played some longer shots for three points in a row I could get back into the match, fortunately that happened and I managed to break him at 4-2”, he added. From there the Spaniard looked solid on the court, closing out the first set and storming his way through the second.<\/p>\n
The Manacor native was happy with his victory and is satisfied with his form since Monte Carlo: “All victories give you confidence, of course, and they help you to keep wining and, obviously, the peace of mind that winning gives you helps”.<\/p>\n
In the quarter-finals he will meet Sousa, who sent the American Jack Sock packing. “He is a great player, we know each other very well, we have trained together in Mallorca”, and he added that the Portuguese “is very dangerous in the final rounds”. In a courtside interview, Rafael Nadal again showed his gratitude for the support of the fans at the Madrid tournament, where, in his words, he “receives the most affection”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rafael Nadal was back on the Manolo Santana Centre Court to play his third-round match against US player Sam Querrey. The Manacor native only needed two sets to see off his opponent (6-4, 6-2) after one hour and ten minutes of play. Despite the result, Nadal had to come back in the first set after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":77067,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[793,17,117,772],"class_list":["post-77066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mutua-news","tag-manolo-santana-centre-court","tag-mutua-madrid-open-en","tag-rafael-nadal-en","tag-the-caja-magica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mutuamadridopen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}