Nadal claims 12th title at Barcelona Open final
Nadal won his first title of the year, squandering a couple of match points and then saving one on his way to beating Stefanos Tsitsipas 6-4, 6-7 (6), 7-5.
Barcelona: Knowing he is still far from his best, Rafael Nadal just kept grinding it out.
He found a way Sunday to overcome lost opportunities in the Barcelona Open final and escape defeat while facing a red-hot opponent.
Nadal won his first title of the year, squandering a couple of match points and then saving one on his way to beating Stefanos Tsitsipas 6-4, 6-7 (6), 7-5.
Nadal secured his record 12th title at the clay-court tournament by converting on his third match point to cap a satisfying victory. It had been a lackluster start to the season for the third-ranked Nadal after he didn’t play much last year amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s the work of every day,” Nadal said.
“It’s about accepting the challenge, it’s about being humble to accept that sometimes you are not playing that well. And you need to fight for it and you need to try to find a solution every day and that’s what I did.”
The match lasted 3 hours, 38 minutes, making it the longest best-of-three set ATP final since stats started being tracked in 1991. It was also the longest best-of-three ATP match so far this year.
It was Nadal’s seventh title in the last 10 editions of the Barcelona Open, and 12th in 16 editions. The tournament was not played last year because of the pandemic.
Nadal called it “probably the toughest final” he had to play in Barcelona. “I never played a final like this in this tournament,” he said. “It means a lot to me. It was an important victory.”
Nadal also needed three sets to advance in his first two matches in Barcelona. He was coming off a loss to Andrey Rublev in the quarterfinals of the Monte Carlo Masters last week, a tournament that Tsitsipas won in a final against Rublev.
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