“Finally they decide that if we don’t have the surgery, probably I will never be back. Then comes the moment that you have to make a decision. If I don’t want to keep going playing tennis, I don’t need it. So then was the decision to try it or not try it. The decision was positive that I wanted to try to come back. That’s why I went to the surgery.”
There was another difficult period when Nadal finally got back on the practice court a few weeks after the procedure. But the decision to go under the knife paid off when he finally felt a change. “After the surgery, I wanted to go for holidays, but the first six weeks I had been at home for doing the first part of the recovery the perfect way,” he explained.
“Then I went for holidays for a while. I came back and started to practice 15 minutes, 20 minutes. At the beginning was a tough process, too. Then the improvement was there.” His sessions have improved since and Nadal has been practising with the likes of Andy Murray and Holger Rune in Brisbane. It remains to be seen how he fares in a competitive match but the Spaniard is already worlds away from his low point during the clay swing.
