Rafael Nadal Must Use Last Year's Loss to Lukas Rosol as Motivation

Just under one year ago, Rafael Nadal suffered one of the worst losses of his career. One year later, he needs to avenge that defeat and use it as motivation toward a deep run at Wimbledon.

It’s the second round at Wimbledon in 2012, and Nadal is taking on the 100th-ranked tennis player in the world, Lukas Rosol. Everyone is expecting Nadal to wipe the floor with Rosol and advance to the third round. What everyone didn’t expect was that Rosol would play the match of his life.

Nadal took the opening set but then dropped back-to-back sets to Rosol. That put Nadal in a major hole, but the No. 2 seed didn’t give in. Nadal took the fourth set to force a decisive fifth. There, Rosol was incredible. Nadal didn’t look like himself, and Rosol took advantage of the opportunity to win against one of the game’s best.

Rosol defeated Nadal with a 6-4 fifth-set victory.

“When an opponent plays like he wanted to play in the fifth, you are in his hands,” Nadal told Christopher Clarey of The New York Times at the time of the loss. Nadal also said that the loss was “not a tragedy” and that “it’s only a tennis match.”

It was not like Nadal had never lost a match before. It just wasn’t his day. Rosol played a fantastic match and deserved the victory. Nadal has to keep the loss in the back of his mind, though, as he needs to remember what went wrong in order to avoid another early exit in 2013.

Nadal sat out for a few months with a knee injury and has bounced back nicely since the loss to Rosol. He has yet to play on grass since that day in June, but he has been successful on other surfaces, which he’s sure to use as inspiration as well.

The Spaniard has won the last four tournaments he’s entered, most notably the French Open a few weeks ago. Nadal has also come out victorious at the Barcelona Open, Masters Series Madrid and Masters Series Rome. All but five matches this year for Nadal have been on clay.

Nadal is 50-12 in his career on grass, and most of those matches have been at Wimbledon, where he’s 36-6. He’s won the Grand Slam twice, in 2008 and 2010. In 2011, he lost in the final to Novak Djokovic, and of course, we’ve already talked about what happened in 2012.

The grass surface at Wimbledon will test how healthy Nadal’s knee truly is. It hasn’t seemed to give him many problems since returning, but the faster he’ll need to react, the more likely it is to affect his play if it still hurts. It’s not expected to be a factor at Wimbledon, though.

Nadal is the fifth seed in the men’s bracket this year, and he’ll be taking on Steve Darcis in the first round of the tournament. Nadal will have to get by the likes of Roger Federer—the best grass player in the world—in order to advance to the semifinals. But Federer isn’t the only big name in the bracket.

Rosol is in the same bracket as Nadal and Federer. In order for the two to meet for the second straight year, both would have to advance to the quarterfinals. That would mean that Rosol would likely need to defeat Federer. He already beat a great player once. Who’s to say he couldn’t do it again?

A rematch between Nadal and Rosol would certainly create plenty of buzz at Wimbledon. But that’s not the main point here. Nadal must use last year’s loss to Rosol as motivation. He’s a great player and needs to show that getting upset in 2012 was no more than a fluke that could’ve happened to anyone.