Australian Open: Lack of game time forces early exit for Sumit Nagal

As early as in the third game of his Australian Open opening round match, Sumit Nagal had an opportunity to show Ricardas Berankis that it might not be an encore of their encounter last week, where the Indian had a listless 6-2, 6-2 outing in the ATP warm-up tournament. Three break point chances at 40-0 on the Berankis serve at 1-1; all three of them squandered with errors from Nagal’s racquet. Another one came along at deuce; another one went abegging. The Lithuanian held, then broke Nagal at 3-2 and went on an eight-game winning run. From sensing an opening to the door fast shutting, things unravelled for Nagal who was a set and 4-0 down in under an hour.

The slow start and early missed chances proved to be Nagal’s undoing in an inconsistent show, the 23-year-old going down 2-6, 5-7, 3-6 to the world No. 73 on Tuesday in his fourth Grand Slam match and his first on the faster Melbourne Park courts. Nagal arrested the eight-game slide by winning four straight ones himself to make it 4-4 in the second set, but the 30-year-old Berankis’s experience and solidity ensured Nagal was only playing a catch-up game thereafter.

“After that (early missed break points), it just became tough for me,” the 144th-ranked Nagal said after the match. “I started missing a lot of balls and struggled a bit. I just got a little more nervous. I panicked a bit, thinking, ‘why didn’t you convert those break points’. And then I was always chasing the game, I was too far behind. I was trying to change things, just trying to win games. Definitely, I should not have lost eight games in a row.”

Sitting in the studios of Mumbai, former India No. 1 Somdev Devvarman—the latest addition to Nagal’s coaching team as high-performance expert at the Nensel Tennis Academy in Germany where the youngster trains—was straightforward in his assessment.

“You can’t show up in a Grand Slam and have your mind be somewhere else in the first 45 minutes. That was something which was disappointing from a coaching point of view. He might have been nervous, which is also understandable,” Devvarman said in the post-match show for Sony.

Nagal began playing more freely after that and provided glimpses of just why he was given a wild card for the season’s opening Grand Slam, pulling out his trademark crisp forehand winners and making a few swift passing shots. But those sparks were in patches and remained jammed in his drawer for the big points of the crucial games. Like in the fifth game of the third set, where Nagal won a couple of brilliant points off his forehand to set up a chance to break before letting Berankis off the hook with errors on both the break points.

“I started feeling a little bit better with the more time I was spending on court,” Nagal said. “Things were working when I was putting pressure on his forehand. I also took a step back from the baseline and made him go for more winners, which I think worked.”

Devvarman felt Nagal’s time to flaunt his quality and strokeplay was once he swung things around from 0-4 to 4-4 in the second set. Instead, Nagal allowed Berankis to gather himself and dictate terms with his inconsistency.

“At that point, when you have momentum on your side is when you need to show the spark. During moments when it really counts, especially at the Slams,” Devvarman said on the show. “He will have to become more consistent, more relentless.”

Nagal put that down to lack of sufficient game time. This was only his second competitive match since October last year, when he had to close down his fairly successful season—Nagal entered the ATP Prague Challenger quarter-finals and the US Open second round—due to a shoulder problem. The recovery from injury and the 14-day quarantine in Melbourne meant Nagal had a short pre-season, and just an hour’s competitive tennis in the warm-up tournament last week before his Australian Open match.

“I should have won more close games. But that’s also because I haven’t played much lately, haven’t played any matches especially on these types of courts. But it’s a learning experience, and I’ve written down a few things that I want to work on from this match,” Nagal said.

Seeking some much-needed rhythm and games under him now, Nagal will shift base to South America for the next couple of months. He plans to get into three ATP 250 tournaments (Cordoba and Buenos Aires in Argentina and Santiago in Chile) followed by a Challenger in Santiago on his preferred clay courts.