Rafael Nadal opened his tennis season with a 7-5, 6-4 win over Dominic Thiem in a practice match played at the Memorial Drive Tennis Club in Adelaide, a city where both have completed their quarantine ahead of the ATP Cup and the Australian Open.
The Spaniards, number two in the world, and the Austrian, number three, were on the field for an hour and 23 minutes in which they were in good athletic condition and They committed the inaccuracies of a season that started as atypically as this 2021.
The game, of a charitable nature, was played with stands full of spectators, who did not wear a chin strap and kept no safety distance at all.
This Friday it will be exactly one year since Thiem defeated Nadal in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open in 2020 7-6 (3), 7-6 (4), 4-6 and 7-6 (6). The Austrian then reached the final, in which he fell to the Serbian Novak Djokovic, who replaced Nadal in the number one in the world.
A year later, the result was the opposite, with Nadal one step ahead of the decisive moments.
In the same tournament, Novak Djokovik had made his debut a few hours earlier, although he only played one set due to the discomfort of blisters on his right hand. His fellow countryman Filip Krajinovic won a set 6-3 against Jannik Sinner and then Djokovic joined the game and won in the second set with the same score against the young Italian.