To understand exactly why this particular match is so special to me, I feel that I need to offer a little bit of context.
Around the start of 2016, I started supporting Dominic Thiem. The match that turned my head his way was his victory against Rafael Nadal in the semi-finals of Buenos Aires: a near-three-hour lung buster which Thiem won in a third-set tiebreak. So it feels apt that Thiem’s second win over Nadal, in the quarter-finals of the 2017 Rome masters, is the match I personally found the most compelling to watch in recent years. Part of what made this match so sweet for me as a Thiem fan is the suffering beforehand. Since Buenos Aires, Thiem had played Nadal three times on clay without getting a set; twice during the 2017 clay swing in the finals of Barcelona and Madrid. Thiem’s level in Madrid was close to the best I’d seen him play, and I distinctly remembered thinking “If he can’t beat Nadal playing this well, it’s never going to happen”. Therefore, I went into this match appropriately pessimistic regarding Thiem’s chances of victory, and to quote my favourite Tennis TV commentator Robbie Koenig, by the end, I needed a soft place for my jaw to land.
The first 20 minutes of the match is still probably the best display of raw ballstriking I’ve ever seen. From the first point, Thiem was hitting the cover off every groundstroke and was unrelenting in his aggressive gamestyle – his backhand especially was a revelation; I’d never seen it struck with such power and control before. The best complement I can give Thiem is that in this period I had never seen Nadal look so overwhelmed and uncomfortable on a clay-court; the commentator going as far to say that he was making the Spaniard look “lightweight”, a word I’d never think would be associated with Nadal and clay. Yet when Thiem was broken serving at 5-2, and forced to have another go at 5-4, I’d be lying if I said my heart wasn’t edging towards my mouth. But Thiem showed impressive mental strength to hold to 15 and wrap up the set. If anything, the level of the second set superseded the first; Nadal being forced to respond to Thiem’s herculean performance. The seventh game is the one that always sticks in my mind – not just because it was when Thiem secured the all-important break, but how he was able to flick a switch and reel off three extraordinary points when the match was on a knife-edge. When the final forehand sailed long from Nadal, it was almost a watershed moment: Nadal on top form could be beaten on the dirt. Without question, it was the highest quality match I had ever seen Thiem play but I could’ve said that last week in Madrid. Even now, each time Thiem plays Nadal on clay, I think back to his match and perceive it as the crowning of the Prince of Clay.
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