Nadal’s quest for faith and form continues at Hamburg Open

Spain’s Rafael Nadal beat compatriot Fernando Verdasco 3-6 6-1 6-1 in the Hamburg Open first round match yesterday. (AFP)By Les Roopanarine/The GuardianThat Rafael Nadal accepted the offer of a wild card for this week’s Hamburg Open says much about the state of his mind and game. Not once in the past decade has the Spaniard arrived at this point in the season without gnawing on a major piece of silverware, as is his wont. But after a wretched run of form since his January return from the wrist injury and appendectomy that effectively wrote off the final six months of last year, sightings of that idiosyncratic victory celebration have been few and far between.He desperately needs matches, and to get those matches he needs wins. His favourite surface continues to offer the best chance of both.Beaten in the last eight of the Australian Open by Tomas Berdych, dethroned by Novak Djokovic at the same stage in Paris and dumped out in the second round of Wimbledon by the veteran Dustin Brown, Nadal has just one more chance to salvage the remarkable record that has brought him a minimum return of one major a year – and 14 in all – since claiming the first of his nine French Open titles in 2005. That opportunity, a long shot at best, comes at the US Open, which starts at the end of August. In New York. On hard courts.Notwithstanding the need to get match tight, why begin the journey to the zippy DecoTurf of Flushing Meadows on slow red clay in Germany? What does Nadal hope to achieve by playing an event he last contested in 2008, when he beat Roger Federer in the final to avenge a rare defeat to the Swiss on the red stuff the previous year?Certainly not a significant boost to a ranking that has slumped to 10th, his lowest position for more than a decade. In 2009, Hamburg was downgraded from Masters Series status to a World Tour 500 event, halving the ranking points on offer. The Spaniard lies 495 points behind the ninth-ranked Marin Cilic, who is not in action this week, so even if he justifies his billing as top seed the most he can hope for is 500 points and a tenuous improvement of one place.The more obvious explanation for Nadal’s presence in the German port city is his continued quest for confidence. When he beat Viktor Troicki to claim the Stuttgart title on grass last month, he could scarcely have looked more delighted had he just won Wimbledon. As he declared himself “really, really happy” and talked of a renewed sense of self-belief, it seemed as though the travails of the European clay-court swing – when he made the remarkably frank admission that he was suffering from nerves and struggling to hit the ball where he wanted – might finally be receding.As we now know, that was an illusion. Barely a fortnight later came the crushing defeat to Brown on Centre Court, and a renewal of the latter-day Spanish inquisition into Nadal’s faltering form and poise. Yet if he is to rediscover the relentless intensity and consistency that once created unassailable mountains in the minds of his opponents, the Spaniard needs to recapture the buoyant self-assurance he briefly found in Stuttgart and parlay it into a more enduring sense of self, rediscovering the warrior mentality that has been his trademark.It is inconceivable that will happen until he puts together a sustained sequence of wins.Whether his first-round win in Hamburg against Fernando Verdasco yesterday kick-starts that chain, only the days ahead will tell. Nadal lost the first set 3-6 before a 12-minute service game, in which he saved three break points, in the second gave him a wake-up call that saw the former world No1 race ahead to a 5-0 lead. Nadal eventually won the match 3-6 6-1 6-1 in just under two hours.Going into the match, Nadal had led their career meetings 13-2, but Verdasco, a former world No7, had won the past two encounters, the most recent of which was in Miami in March.Despite the win, Rafa could certainly have wished for a gentler reintroduction to competitive action in his first outing since Wimbledon.Yet, however remote Nadal’s chances of claiming a third US Open crown come the second Sunday in September, the speed with which he has been dismissed in some quarters remains astonishing. From carving a niche in tennis history at a time when Federer was bestriding the world like the proverbial colossus, to rebounding from the loss of three successive major finals to Djokovic between Wimbledon 2011 and the following year’s Australian Open – a psychological blow from which a lesser competitor might never have recovered – the Spaniard has answered every question asked of him in his career. Whatever the outcome of his week’s work in Hamburg, it would be foolhardy to write him off.