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Tennis, Australian Open: Tiafoe vs. Nadal offficial in-game thread. (Quarter Finals)
In what was expected to be a tough match against an in-form Tomas Berdych, Rafael Nadal delivered an utterly dominant performance en route to a straight forward win, 6-0 6-1 7-6. Rafael Nadal is yet to drop a set so far in this campaign, having previously scored straight-set wins over James Duckworth, Alex de Minaur and Matthew Ebden.“With the serve, we changed few things, but nothing drastic, nothing dramatic. Good thing I had some time to work with it. I am happy, more or less, how the serve is working during the first official event that I am playing," Rafael Nadal is happy with his altered serve-motion. Australian Open has been the world #2 Rafael Nadal's least successful grand slam event over the years — won the title once and finished as the runner-up thrice — and quarterfinal exit has been his most frequent result here, having failed at this stage on five occasions — most recently against Marin Cilic in 2018 (retired). Former world #1 Rafael Nadal has withdrawn or retired from 12 of his last 13 hardcourt tournaments and the only time he managed to complete a tournament was at Toronto 2018, where he defeated Stefanos Tsitsipas in the title-decider. The best couple of weeks in Francis Tiafoe's career keeps getting better as he knocked out last year's quarterfinalist Grigor Dimitrov in four sets to advance into the quarterfinal of Australian Open, 7-5 7-6 6-7 7-5. While Rafael Nadal has won 17 grand slam titles and made numerous quarterfinal appearances at this level, the American youngster will make his maiden quarterfinal appearance in grand slam on Tuesday. Francis Tiafoe will now look to become only the first American to reach the semifinal of Australian open in more than a decade. Andy Roddick (2010) and Tennys Sandgren (2018) made to this stage recently but couldn't progress further, losing to Marin Cilic and Hyeon Chung, respectively. "I'm so excited to play Rafa. We're going to have some fun, going to have some long rallies. I hope I can play on Laver. That would be cool. That's just an honor playing on that court," said an excited Francis Tiafoe ahead of the biggest match of his career. Apart from suffering a handful of upsets in Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal has rarely failed against massive underdogs in grand slams and in fact, he defeated all the younger generation players he faced over the last 13 months — Tsitsipas, Khachanov, Alex de Minaur, Denis Shapovalov, and Alexander Zverev. Though Tiafoe is high on confidence at the moment, he's got a mountain to climb on Tuesday.
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Originally Posted by jjgold
