Rafael Nadal opened his tennis season with a 7-5, 6-4 victory over Dominic Thiem in an exhibition match he played at the Memorial Drive Tennis Club in Adelaide, a city where they both completed their quarantine before 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 sports and They committed the inaccuracies of a season as atypical as this 2021.
The game, of a charitable nature, was played with grandstands full of spectators, who neither wore a ponytail nor kept any safe distance.
This Friday marks exactly one year since Thiem defeated Nadal in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open in 2020 with 7-6 (3), 7-6 (4), 4-6 and 7-6 (6). The Austrian then reached the final, in which he lost to the Serbian Novak Djokovic, who thus replaced Nadal in world number one.
A year later, the result was the other way around, with Nadal one step ahead in the decisive moments.
In the same tournament, Novak Djokovik made his debut a few hours earlier, although he only played one set due to the discomfort caused by blisters on his right hand. His compatriot Filip Krajinovic won a set 6-3 in front of Jannik Sinner and then Djokovic joined the game and prevailed in the second set with the same score against the young Italian.