World No. 2 Rafael Nadal summed up the straight-sets shellacking he absorbed from top-ranked Novak Djokovic simply.
The world No. 1 played close to perfect tennis powering to his record seventh Australian Open title, said Nadal.
Watch: Djokovic Demolishes Nadal for 7th AO Title
"I am not new on this. I know these kind of things happens," Nadal told the media in Melbourne. "Even to the best players of the history happened. I don't say I have been destroyed. I have been playing against a player that was at the highest level possible, in my opinion, tonight. A player playing like this is difficult to win."
Playing his first tournament since hobbling out of the US Open semifinals, Nadal had no answers suffering his eighth-straight hard-court loss to his rival.
Djokovic cracked 34 winners and did not drop serve defeating Nadal for the 28th time in 53 meetings.
The 17-time Grand Slam champion said Djokovic was simply too good in all phases of the game.
"He was better than me tonight," Nadal said. "That's the sport. We can talk a lot, but when the player did almost everything better than you, you can't complain much. The only thing that you can say is congrats to the opponent, well done.
"For my side being very happy, big personal satisfaction about the two weeks, you can't imagine, is nice and easy now playing the final here, looks always that. But I have been going through very tough moments. After the US Open, I didn't had the chance to play for three weeks or four weeks for the knee. Then I came back, and two days or three days before Bercy, I felt the feet, that something going wrong. I went to Bercy, had a strain in the abdominal. Then I came back, had to do surgery to the feet because a small portion of the ankle was gone. Is all the time under a tough process of things.
"Then when you want to start the season, what happened for me in the thigh at the beginning of the season, is a lot of issues. Even if I always say that I am a positive, believing that the things can go better all the time, that's tough. That's mentally tough. It's painful that you can't do the things that you need to do to be 100% fit. If we analyze all this stuff, have been probably better impossible two weeks for me, even if tonight was not my day, because the opponent played too good, and I was not ready to face that level tonight. But I believe that I can be ready in a couple of months if I am able to keep practicing and to keep competing at that level."
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