Rafael Nadal debuted his tennis season with a 7-5, 6-4 victory over Dominic Thiem in an exhibition match played at the Memorial Drive Tennis Club in Adelaide, a city where both have completed their previous forties at the ATP Cup and the Australian Open.
The Spaniard, world number two, and the Austrian, number three, were on the track for an hour and 23 minutes in which they were in good athletic condition and to commit the inaccuracies of a start to the season as atypical as that of 2021.
The match, of a charitable nature, was played with grandstands full of spectators, who neither wore beards nor kept any safety distance.
This Friday marks exactly one year since Thiem beat Nadal in the quarterfinals of the 2020 Australian Open by 7-6 (3), 7-6 (4), 4-6 and 7-6 (6). The Austrian then reached the final, in which he fell to Serbia’s Novak Djokovic, who thus replaced Nadal in world number one.
A year later, the result was the opposite, with Nadal one step ahead in the decisive moments.
In the same tournament he had debuted a few hours earlier Novak Djokovik, although he only played one set because of the discomfort caused by blisters on his right hand. His compatriot Filip Krajinovic won a 6-3 heat to Jannik Sinner and then Djokovic joined the match and prevailed in the second set by the same score against the young Italian.