Dominic Thiem after French Open 2019: three things he can learn from Rafael Nadal
Dominic Thiem once again sold dearly at the French Open 2019. After a hard-fought five-set win over Novak Djokovic, he only failed in the final against Rafael Nadal. After studying video and spending some time analyzing, the 25-year-old recognized three things that he wanted to learn from the king of the clay court.
by Lukas Zahrer
last edit: Jun 12, 2019, 09:03 am
It was less than two days before Dominic Thiem met the domestic press in Vienna to take stock of his sixth appearance at Roland Garros. As in the previous year, he was also present at the award ceremony on Sunday, but for the third time in his career it was only enough for a silver tray.
"I forgot the trophy at Kiki in Paris," admitted Thiem, who quickly used the present for the finalist as a cup holder. "I have one of the juniors (2011 final), two for the adults, it is time to get the big trophy."
Dominic Thiem after studying video: "Nadal reduced points"
In the meantime, Thiem had watched the highlight scenes of his match against Nadal, and he assured him: "There are some things that I can do even better and look at from Nadal." Specifically, the man from Lichtenwörth leads three points.
On the one hand, Thiem was impressed by how the Spaniard “followed his balls. In contrast to me, he likes to climb into the field, take the balls early and take my time. So he shortened the points significantly. ”He himself had done too little in the final. It is one of the points he still needs to close the gap to Nadal, who celebrated his twelfth French Open title on Sunday.
Rafael Nadal's Volleys: A Power on the Net
A second point that struck Thiem: "The last time Rafa hit a volley must have been seven years ago." The Mallorcan hardly made any mistakes on the net, even though, according to Thiem, "there were really difficult balls."
In fact, Nadal came on the net 27 times and then made the point 23 times. He successfully designed 85 percent of the network attacks, thus exceeding Thiem's strong network performance (12/15, 80 percent gained points).
Most of the time, Nadal was able to construct the point from the baseline in such a way that he had a supposedly light volley to score after an attack ball.
# IMG2 #
Thiem about "mistakes" before 3rd sentence: "This only happens against Nadal"
A third point that Thiem wants to avoid in the future has less to do with tactics. Rather, he struggled with the way the game slipped after the second set he won. "I made a small mistake," Thiem admitted.
While he was "fully up to speed" after winning the set, Nadal's toilet break gave him problems. His system was shut down a bit, which caused him to go into the third set somewhat cooled. "Maybe I should have left the field, put on a fresh jersey and started fresh in the third," said Thiem.
And further: “He made incredible use of it. It doesn't matter against other players because I might be playing my serve game. But I played two bad points and he climbed on top of me. That actually only happens against Nadal and against one or two other players. "
In the end, the game lasted 19 minutes longer than the final of 2018, Thiem ended up losing again despite winning a set. Nevertheless, he had fueled a lot of strength and motivation for the future from the two weeks in Paris. "I'm looking forward to Roland Garros 2020."