Doha is hoping for a headline-grabbing final between Noak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal in the ATP Qatar Open next Saturday, but the chances of such a meeting may not be as strong as would seem.
While the ATP 250 event would stand to offer a clear path to a final for the top two ranked players in tennis, Nadal, the holder of 14 grand slam titles, sounded unusually downbeat about his ability to quickly recover from an appendix operation on Sunday, and perhaps also worries about a troublesome back.
Nadal looked rusty as he fell 6-2, 6-0 to Andy Murray in the Mubadala World Tennis Championship semi-finals on Friday before beating Australian Open champion Stan Wawrinka in the third-place play-off.
Asked whether the result was important to him this week, Nadal said philosophically: “The result is sport, the result is life.”
“The more matches I can play the better for my health,” he said. “If I am able to win a couple of matches it will be fantastic. If not, I am ready to accept everything, and that I will need to take time.
“I hope to be competitive soon. It’s not an ideal situation in which to be trying to win a title again. If I can win a couple of matches, maybe the feeling will be different for me.”
It may help Nadal that his first match is against a qualifier and his first significant test may not come until Thursday when he could play Leonardo Mayer, the eighth-seeded Argentine, or Andreas Seppi, the talented Italian.
If he does reach Friday’s semi-finals he could play either Richard Gasquet, the Frenchman who won the Doha title two years ago, or Tomas Berdych, the third-seeded former Wimbledon finalist from the Czech Republic.
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