Taylor Fritz was in his patio chair thinking about what might have been and he sensed that no defeat had ever hurt like this because he felt like crying. “I never felt like I could cry after a loss,” said Fritz, the 24-year-old rising American star who won’t go any higher at the All England Club this year after beating Nadal 3-6, 7-5. , 3-6, 7-5, 7-6 (10-4). A thriller of a quarter-final, it lasted 4 hours 21 minutes and might have gone much longer if not for the new rule at Wimbledon this year which requires a first-to-10-point tiebreak to be played at 6-6 in the fifth set. English football player David Beckham, watching from the royal box, might have preferred penalties. Fritz, a thunderous server who can also hit the ground, upset Nadal to win the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., in March in a match that Fritz played with an injured ankle and Nadal played with a stress fracture in his rib of. Fritz was on the verge of a more significant success on Wednesday and, in the end, won as many points as Nadal (168 each). But for all Fritz’s power and hustle, he couldn’t win the points that mattered most. he couldn’t take advantage of Nadal’s abdominal injury or a two-sets-to-one lead. He quickly lost control of the deciding tiebreak, falling behind, 0-5, as Nadal invoked the shooting and guile that have made him a 22-time Grand Slam singles champion. “Rafa did what Rafa does: He figures things out,” said Paul Annacone, one of Fritz’s coaches. “He understands what he has on the day and never makes it easy for the opponent. That’s why he’s by far the most accomplished guy in the history of tennis.” Nadal, still chasing a Grand Slam at 36, will face Australia’s Nick Kyrgios, another big server with a much more volatile personality, on Friday for a place in the men’s singles final. In Friday’s other semifinal, No. 1 Novak Djokovic, the three-time defending Wimbledon champion, will face No. 9 Cameron Norrie, the last remaining British singles player. The question is whether the second-seeded Nadal will be healthy enough to play. Nadal said he came close to withdrawing from the match after aggravating a lower abdominal injury midway through the first set. But even without a full serve and even with his father and sister urging him from the stands to retire, Nadal, as so often, found the solutions he needed to prevail, even if he didn’t look much more optimistic than Fritz when he arrived for a sotto voce press conference. “Obviously today is nothing new,” he said of the injury. “I had these feelings for a few days. Without a doubt, today was the worst day. There was a significant increase in pain and limitation. And that’s all. I managed to win this match. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.” He said he would undergo further tests on Thursday before deciding whether to return to the Center to face Kyrgios, who upset him on the same court in their first meeting in 2014 in the round of 16. Nadal has won six of the other eight matches, including a testing second-round duel at Wimbledon in 2019 where Kyrgios deliberately hit Nadal full-body shots and felt no need to apologise. “Nick is a great player on all surfaces, but especially here on grass,” Nadal said. “He’s having a great grass season. It will be a big challenge. I have to be at my 100% to keep getting opportunities and that’s what I’ll try to do.” Nadal is clearly tired of talking about his body, tired of dealing with the injuries that just kept coming during his intermittently shocking season. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” Nadal said. For the first time in his long career, Nadal won the first two Grand Slam tournaments of the season, the Australian Open and the French Open. No man has completed a Grand Slam, winning all four majors in the same year, since Rod Laver in 1969, but Nadal kept his bid alive with Laver, 83, watching from the royal box. Nadal managed it by settling for a much slower serve that Fritz said gave him more trouble than Nadal’s serve. Nadal left the court for a medical timeout with a 4-3 lead in the second set and said he received anti-inflammatory medication and treatment from a physiotherapist. “For the whole of the first set and for the whole of the second and a lot of the third, the problem was not just the serve, but that if I served I could feel the pain for the rest of the point and I wouldn’t be able to play it normally. explained. “It took me a while to figure it out.” Average service speeds on Wednesday were 107 miles per hour for first serves and 94 miles per hour for second serves compared to 115 and 100 in the previous round. But once he adjusted, he said he no longer had lingering discomfort during exchanges and felt uninhibited in his strikes. “For many moments, I thought I might not be able to finish the race,” he said, speaking to the Center crowd. “But, I don’t know, the pitch, the energy, something else, so yeah, thanks for that.” Nadal has not always been the crowd favorite at Wimbledon, where his long-time rival Roger Federer has long enjoyed that role. But Federer, 40, is not playing here this year and Nadal, back for the first time since 2019, is getting plenty of positive feedback as he bids to win Wimbledon for a third time. He pressed on Wednesday, leveling the match at two sets and then going up a break in the fifth to lead 4-3, only to lose his own serve in the next game. But as the match extended beyond four hours, he regained control and wrapped up victory with a classic forehand winner through the baseline, with the bolo-whip finish behind his left ear. It was a Wimbledon full of surprises. Before it started, the All England Club banned Russian and Belarusian players because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Three top players — Matteo Berretini, Marin Cilic and Roberto Bautista Agut — withdrew after contracting the coronavirus. However, Nadal and Djokovic are still in contention, as is Simona Halep, the former No.1 who won Wimbledon in 2019 and is in renewed form with the help of her new coach, Patrick Mouratoglou. Romanian Halep will face Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina in the semi-finals on Thursday. Ons Jabeur, the No. 3 seed from Tunisia, will play Tatjana Maria, a No. 103 seed from Germany who was the biggest surprise of the women’s tournament. Last year, Fritz came close to stunning Djokovic before losing in five sets in the third round of the Australian Open in a match in which, strangely enough, Djokovic suffered an abdominal injury. The script against Nadal must have felt all too familiar and he said his biggest regret was not pushing Nadal harder the three times Nadal served to stay in the match. “In the end, he was really, really, really good,” Fritz said. “At certain points in the match I felt maybe I needed to come up with more, do more. I left him a lot and he gave it to me.”
