By Chris Oddo | Monday June 4, 2018
Rafael notched his 900th ATP win and cruised into the quarterfinals at Roland Garros with a straight-sets win over Maximilian Marterer.
Photo Source: Clive Brunskill/Getty
Rafael Nadal’s quest for an 11th Roland Garros title continues unabated.
The Spaniard surged into the quarterfinals with a straightforward win over rising 22-year-old Maximilian Marterer on Monday in Paris to notch his 900th ATP win and stretch his run of consecutive sets won at Roland Garros to 37.
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Nadal is just the fifth player to reach 900 wins in the Open Era, and his run of sets won on the terre battue of Paris places him just four shy of Bjorn Borg’s all-time record of 41, which was set from 1979-81 during the Swede’s heyday.
The heyday of Nadal is an altogether more impressive affair, and the surly Spaniard showed the spectators at a packed Court Philippe-Chatrier plenty of the magic that comes attached to his reputation.
Marterer, a 22-year-old southpaw who has been quite a revelation in Paris this year, landed some big punches against Nadal and snuck away with the first two games of the match before Nadal dug his heels in and began to mark his territory with trademark forehands and his confounding defense.
Nadal reeled off five games before Marterer managed another hold, and the Spaniard sealed off the set in the next game then swiftly tapped the accelerator again to cruise through a most dominant second set that saw him win 30 of 47 points and never face a break point while dropping just five points on serve.
If it seemed to be happening far too fast for Marterer out there, it was.
The Nuremberg native, making his Roland Garros main draw debut, upset No.24-seeded Denis Shapovalov in the second round and backed that up with a victory over lucky loser Jurgen Zopp. But none of that could have prepared him for a first career meeting against Nadal, especially on the red Parisian clay where the Spaniard has now racked up 83 wins in 85 matches.
But it was a good showing by the German, who never got frustrated and kept hammering away as he searched for solutions. As he stretched his game to its limit Marterer was rewarded in the third stanza with a break, and even though it was quickly recovered by Nadal he marched in lockstep with the Spaniard into a tiebreaker before yielding.
Marterer hit 14 winners in that third set, compared to 11 in the first two sets combined.
Nadal closed his business in two hours and 30 minutes, clinching his 412th career clay-court victory and 23rd in 24 matches on clay this season.
The 32-year-old celebrated his birthday on Sunday by sharing cake with the media. On Monday he was back at the place where he celebrates most often—the fabled Court Philippe-Chatrier.
Nadal finished with 39 winners and 29 unforced errors, and he broke serve five times on ten opportunities. He’ll move on to face Argentina’s Diego Schwartzman in the quarterfinals, with just three victories separating him and an unthinkable eleventh Roland Garros title.