What should Toni Nadal say to Felix Auger-Aliassime, his pupil, when the pupil faces Rafael Nadal?
The basic package would consist of squeezing the first serve and preventing the man from Manacori from taking control of the point, cornering the Canadian and forcing him to hit backhand again and again.
Said and done.
Toni Nadal stirs in his seat, located in the Auger-Aliassime box (22), and the match starts, the second day of the Green Group in the Masters Cup, and the Canadian diversifies the first serves, now to the corner, now to the T, while adding aces. He has two in the first game and another in the third (when the first set is scored, in 54 minutes, the Canadian has accumulated seven aces, none for Nadal), so that the man from Manaco looks like in his ill-fated debut, on Sunday, when he was chasing ghost shots against Taylor Fritz (then lost 7-6(3), 6-1).
How bad this Cup of Masters has always been for Manacorí.
It's late on the calendar.
It catches him physically diminished and on top of that he competes on a fast and covered surface.
This is the territory of the servers, players who abound in this Green Group, such as Taylor Fritz or Auger-Aliassime, and Nadal -with this chain of four consecutive defeats, something never seen since 2009- feels out of his habitat.
He doesn't play or they let him, and we can verify all this in the eighth game, when the Canadian (sixth racket in the world, one of the most accredited members of the Next Gen) breaks his serve and already begins to sail with a tailwind.
Weighed down by circumstances, Nadal has no options, least of all when Auger-Aliassime is inspired. If the Canadian gets the first serve, there is no way. Midway through the second set, he hits another three aces in one fell swoop in a single game.
Serves at 218 km/h, how to find out where the ball is going to go?
Nadal tries to anticipate when he remains, sometimes he sees the light on the second serve, but the Canadian does not slow down and mistreats him and makes life difficult for him in this Masters Cup in Turin, the venue for the tournament of the eight best rackets during the next five years.
Fourteen aces ends up accumulating the Canadian, by just one from Nadal, an unbearable ballast in the territory of the strikers.
Waiting for Ruud-Fritz tonight (9pm), Nadal's chances are minimal.
There are too many caroms that he needs to stay on his feet, some don't even depend on the manacorí, gibberish for a tennis player accustomed to superlative feats.
