Muller stuns Nadal in second-round play
WIMBLEDON, England – By the end, the joy was gone from Rafael Nadal’s game. All those uppercuts, hops and yells of “Vamos!” he normally displays were replaced by the serious look of someone taking mental notes.
The spunk and strokes that carried Nadal to a French Open championship on clay just don’t have the same effect on grass right now, and while the 19-year-old Spaniard is convinced he can learn enough to win a title at the All England Club, that day must wait.
The No. 4-seeded Nadal lost 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 Thursday in the second round of Wimbledon to 69th-ranked Gilles Muller, the only man from Luxembourg to win a Grand Slam match in the Open era.
Nadal was beaten but unbowed, saying he’d like to build a grass court on his home island of Mallorca so he can practice on the slick surface. Of the four majors, Nadal grew up most wanting to win Wimbledon, because only one Spanish man has, Manuel Santana in 1966.
“When I improve a lot, I can win a lot of matches here, no? Because I am fast,” said Nadal, whose English is getting better by the day. “I need to improve my volley, I need to improve my serve, I need to improve my confidence with the game on grass, no?”
Looking forward in the women’s tournament, it’s tough not to focus on the potential fourth-round matchup between the Williams siblings. It looked for a time as if Serena Williams might not make it to the end of this week, but she recovered to beat qualifier Mara Santangelo of Italy 2-6, 6-3, 6-2.
Williams, whose older sister Venus beat Nicole Pratt 7-5, 6-3, said she’s playing on a slightly broken left ankle, and though it appeared to hamper her early on, she was racing to turn Santangelo’s drop shots into winners by late in the second set.
The woman she lost to in last year’s Wimbledon final, Maria Sharapova, was a 6-0, 6-1 winner over Sesil Karatantcheva, the 15-year-old Bulgarian who surprised Venus Williams en route to the French Open quarterfinals. Karatantcheva pledged to rout Sharapova before they played at Indian Wells, Calif., last year. Karatantcheva is now 0-3 against the Russian.