Bill Simons
Madrid
After Rafa Nadal and Feliciano Lopez’s amazing 10-8 second-set win in the third and decisive match of the night against Britain, a doubles match that would determine who would face Canada in the Davis Cup final here in Madrid, I asked Rafa the first question of the 1:00 AM press conference. It was a simple, but not so simple question. He gave an amazing answer.
IT: I want to ask you, Rafa, can you say what this amazing match said to you tonight?
RAFAEL NADAL: Well, yeah, a lot of emotions out there, you know, playing my team. Yeah, a lot of things, we went through a lot of things this week – no, honestly, every day.
Yesterday, I went inside my room at 4:24 in the morning. Two days ago we had the father of Roberto [Bautista Agut] pass away, so is a terrible thing. Today Pablo [Carrena Busto] had been under some diet thing from yesterday and then Marcel [Granollers], he was not feeling well, no?
So a lot of things. So we needed to find a way. And Feli [Lopez] played good singles without being ready, because probably Feli didn’t expect to play the singles. Then I won my singles and then we had doubles.
We played [doubles] in the past but it has been a long time since Feli and I play together. But we know each other well, we have a very good relationship, we are very good friends from a long time ago. So that helps in these important moments that you have somebody that you have a great feeling for. And that’s what happened.
We knew it was going to be a very, very tough battle out there with not a lot of chances. In the beginning, yes. Then in the second set, yeah, we were not able to find a way to win points on the return. But we needed to wait and to hold our serves. It doesn’t matter the way, but we arrived to the tiebreak. Then in the tiebreak, we saved some incredible moments, some incredible points.
We can’t be happier to be where we are today, no? We can say thank you very much to the rest of the team that are not here with us, but they are so important for all of us. Every day until very late at night they are working so hard to prepare us for the next day. So we can’t thank enough them.
And of course, we can’t thank enough all the crowd, because without them, I will not say we don’t going to win, but for sure the percentage of chances of victory will be much, much lower.
