It’s twelve noon in Madrid, a leaden and rather cold day. The Polish Iga Swiatek, the shining number one, parades there with a long face, forced to lie aside because her right shoulder asks for a truce after 22 wins and four consecutive titles; At lunchtime Garbiñe Muguruza appears in the opposite direction, already recovered from the joint – after 46 days off – and ready to put an end to her bad luck in the Caja Mágica, where she has never managed to go beyond the eighths; In between, Paula Badosa, the brand new number two, intervenes, happy to return to the stage that was last year “a before and after”, cautious before the tricky premiere this Thursday (around 2:00 p.m., Teledeporte and Movistar) against the Russian Veronika Kudermetova.
And in the middle of the parade, in her bubble and sheltered under large helmets from the brand that sponsors her, Naomi Osaka makes an appearance and says that she has been trying to not be so hard on herself for a while; more now than the present, she forces him to play ball on clay, a surface to which she has always been allergic and which has caused her quite a few disappointments. However, the Japanese, winner of four majors and former number one, trying to recover the lost course since the course publicly uncovered her ills at Roland Garros, has decided to change her chip.
“I want to have fun on the court, I try to focus on each tournament and get to Roland Garros well. My goal is to try to win a title, but for now I am confident of reaching the semi-finals here or in Rome”, he explains in the lower exterior of the Caja Mágica, while polishing a plan that had the starting point recently in Mallorca. “I was training there for a week and I feel very excited for my first match,” adds the 36th in the world, who during her time at Nadal’s academy took note of the Balearic’s maneuvers to reverse his bad dynamics on clay .
“I think I have stolen something from Rafa on clay [sin precisar el qué] and that I have trained her; It can go very well or very badly. Since I’ve been doing it, it’s been going well for me. I want to watch the good players on the ground as they train so I can learn. I also want to see Alcaraz. Every child has tried to be Nadal at some point”, continues the Japanese woman, whose performance on sand leaves no room for doubt: in Madrid, without going any further, her record includes one fall in the first round, two in the second and the quarter of 2019.
Green shoots
This season, Osaka (24 years old) has not finished taking flight and is still far from that Osaka that one day seemed like it would eat the world and mark an era. However, in recent times his game has offered green shoots – final in Miami, against Swiatek – and his speech is more optimistic than before.
“Not every day is perfect, I talk to my therapist at least once a week and I try to have a more open look at all the variables around me so that they do not affect me and I focus on giving my best. Many sad moments in my career have made me better as a person,” she explains. “I do mental exercises and try not to spend a lot of time on Twitter, for me it is more negative than Instagram. Now people can say bad things, but I try to continue being who I am”, he adds when he is reminded of this year’s episode in Indian Wells, where he broke down emotionally after receiving an isolated insult from the stands in the middle of the game.
Videos, stress and a thorn
In that effort to win records, get rich as a player and to solve once and for all the spring problem of each year, Osaka – “I’m still a student in full learning” – landed a week earlier than planned in Europe to save time and work the new mechanisms; among others, redesigning the construction of the point in a more leisurely and less direct way, without having to permanently bet on risk as it does on cement.
“I will try to take the dirt tour very seriously. I’m going to watch a lot of videos of Nadal to see how he moves”, he warned after losing to Swiatek in the Miami final. He has a thorn in the Japanese, who at Roland Garros has never managed to cross the barrier of the third round and, in some way, wants to settle a debt with herself. “I haven’t won a tournament on this surface yet; that excites me and at the same time causes me stress ”, she anticipated in 2021. Later came the Paris chapter, its disappearance until the Tokyo Games and a final stretch of the year in the shadows. Now, Osaka seeks redemption. And, for this, she proposes a personal challenge: clay.
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