Nadal: ‘During the warm up I felt strange. Djokovic? I’ve a very good relationship with Him’

After a very bad beginning of the match, Rafael Nadal played better to beat Sam Querrey 6-4 6-2. The Spaniard was down 1-4 in the first set and had to save a dangerous break point that would have brought Querrey to serve to win the set:  ‘Every single opponent is tough – Rafa recognized – All the players that have opponents who hit the ball so hard, you know that there will be moments that they will hurt you. Also, the fact of playing at night, you know, I hadn’t trained a single day during the nighttime. It was a completely different feeling. Today it was a little bit covered, a little bit slower, cloudy. Well, at the beginning when we were warming up I was feeling a little bit strange, but actually during the week I’ve been training well and playing well.’

Nadal believes that making unforced errors at the very beginning did not help him: ‘I think that when you lose so many points at the beginning, well, you have doubts. He was going to serve for the 5-3 with new balls. You know that you’re there at the limit and you can lose the set. Not the match because you still have another set to go, but it was tough. In that moment I decided to step back a little bit and change a little bit the game, open it a little bit more, try to return the ball properly, try to close the gap so that he couldn’t just go for the …

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