Nadal had never made 12 double faults in a match

Rafa Nadal had a very hard time beating Denis Shapovalov in the Australian Open quarterfinals last Tuesday, among other things, due to the heat stroke that practically left him KO midway through the third set and from which he recovered as best he could to miraculously win the match in the fifth set.

But there was another circumstance that jeopardized his triumph: double faults. The Balearic committed 11, an unusual figure that he had not reached before in any game of his professional career. Carlos Moyà revealed it in the big game of the COPE and the data corroborate his affirmation.

The maximum number of double faults that Nadal had accumulated in a match was eight, on three occasions. The last one was in the Roland Garros semi-finals last year, when he lost to Djokovic. In the 2018 Davis Cup tie against Germany, the Spaniard reached the same amount in a duel against Kohlschreiber that he ended up winning. And the first time he added eight was at the 2014 Indian Wells Masters 1,000, when he played in the second round against the Czech Stepanek. Nadal has 1,995 double faults in the 1,245 games recorded by the ATP, at a tiny average of 1.6 per game.

Sabalenka’s drama

On the flip side of this ominous statistic is Aryna Sabalenka, eliminated in the round of 16 after committing 56 double faults in four matches. In the two games he played in Adelaide this season before the start of the Australian Open, he did 39, with what he has accumulated so far this year 95. In 2021 she led the table with 338, ahead of the 305 of Paula Badosa, who also has problems controlling the serve. In 2020 he also ‘won’ with 166 in a short course due to the pandemic. In 2019 he was second with 350 behind Jelena Ostapenko’s 436. And in 2018 he accumulated 299, which means that instead of improving it has gotten worse. In the ATP, Shapovalov, Zverev, Auger-Aliassime, Paire and Bublik are frequently among the worst in the last five years.