Toni Nadal He is being a commentator on DAZN for the <a href="https://www.archysport.com/2024/02/a-new-exhibition-tournament-in-saudi-arabia-with-novak-djokovic-and-rafael-nadal/" title="A new exhibition tournament in Saudi Arabia with Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal”>Six Kings Slam, an exhibition tournament being held in Arabia. For the event, a pavilion, “The Venue”, has been built in record time, with capacity for 8,000 spectators. It is played on a hard court and covered, and on the first day, in which Sinner beat Medvedev (6-0 and 6-3) and Alcaraz beat Rune (6-4 and 6-2), it was possible to see that it is very fast and at times it was difficult to see too many exchanges.
In this sense, Uncle Toni said that his sport is increasingly tends more towards everything being too fastwith short points and without any tactics. Against this he has a solution, which he repeated: make the rackets smaller. The players are getting taller and also that now does not conflict with them moving wonderfully. If the length of the racket is added to that height, serves are made from very high up, almost as if it were a shot. “Tennis is the only sport that starts with a penalty“, stated Toni in the broadcast. “It’s as if in football you start with a penalty or in basketball with free throws, and if they stop or make a mistake that’s when the game begins,” he reflected. For him, what spectators want to see are long points, and tennis is precisely heading towards the opposite.
Hit and not think
It is a fight that the technician who won 17 Grand Slams alongside Nadal has had for a long time. “There is a tendency in tennis to hit harder and harder, to think less and less, and that is a problem,” he said at the 2015 Australian Open, almost ten years ago. “They come out, they hit a serve. at 300 per hour and the first ball that comes also does it at 300…And if I miss it, then I go to the next point. It seems that it is the logic, what comes, that the new generations are this type of player and. I don’t know if that’s what the viewer wants to see,” he continued. There he already reasoned his proposal to make the rackets smaller: “In golf, when the clubs gave off more power, propelling the ball further, they lengthened the fields. You can’t lengthen the court, but there is another, much simpler solution: if the racket were smaller, things would probably change,” he insisted. For him, tennis has to remain a sport of skill, rather than physicality.
