Tennis judgment Nadal vs Medvedev Whose victory belongs to?

6th seed Rafael Nadal and 2nd seed Daniil Medvedev face each other in the Australian Open final. Who will win the first Grand Slam of 2022?

Tennis judgment Nadal vs Medvedev Whose victory belongs to?

Nadal hit the Grand Slam final for the first time since winning Roland Garros in October 2020 while the last Grand Slam final Medvedev appeared only 4 months ago. That’s when he beat Novak Djokovic to win the US Open title.

This is the 29th Grand Slam final of Nadal’s career. In the previous 28 finals, he won 20 times. Nadal won 297 matches and lost only 41 matches at Grand Slam tournaments.

However, this is only Nadal’s sixth Australian Open final and he has only won it once in 2009. Nadal lost the remaining four Australian Open finals in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2019.In the 90 matches played at the Australian Open, Nadal won 75 matches and lost the remaining 15 matches.

At this year’s tournament, there were 3 matches Nadal (34 years old) had to play more than 3 sets, of which in the quarter-final with Shapovalov, Nadal had to hit 5 sets and took more than 4 hours to defeat his opponent. As for Daniil Medvedev, this is the 5th Grand Slam final of the Russian tennis player. Medvedev won his first Grand Slam title in September 2021 after beating Djokovic in the US Open final.

This is also the second year in a row that Medvedev has reached the final of the Australian Open. In 2021, he lost to Djokovic in the final. Medvedev has played a total of 69 matches in Grand Slam tournaments so far, of which won 51 matches and lost 18 matches. Particularly in the Australian Open, Medvedev played 24 matches of which 19 won and 5 lost.

Medvedev’s journey to the Australian Open final this year is somewhat more difficult than Nadal’s. There were 4 matches the Russian player had to hit more than 3 sets to defeat his opponent, in which the quarter-final match against Canadian player Auger Aliassime, Medvedev also had to hit 5 sets to win.

This is only the 5th time Nadal and Medvedev have faced each other in their careers and Nadal is leading 3-1 in head-to-head record. The most notable match between them before was the final of the US Open 2019 where Nadal had to hit 5 sets to defeat Medvedev despite winning the first 2 sets.