Tennis Briefing: Nadal’s shirt drama, Swiatek and Sabalenka’s amazing final

Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the big stories from the last week on court.

This week, the Madrid Open came to a close, with Andrey Rublev and Iga Swiatek winning the single’s tournaments. Asking for Rafael Nadal’s shirt caused a storm, Danielle Collins said, “Let’s go,” (and sadly left) and Daniil Medvedev summoned the energy of Dan Brown.

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Did you hear the one about Iga Swiatek and tiebreaks?

Swiatek is the world No 1. She has 20 WTA Tour titles, four Grand Slam titles, and more than 100 weeks as the best player in the world.

Now, she has also won a deciding-set tiebreak.

In a titanic final against world No 2 Aryna Sabalenka, the Pole saved three match points en route to victory, extending her head-to-head against her nearest rival in the rankings to 7-3 in her favour. In her entire career to date, Swiatek had played two deciding set tiebreaks and had lost them both: to Jelena Ostapenko in Dubai in 2022, and to Martina Di Giuseppe in a $50k event in Prague in 2018. Having to play the third of her entire professional career in a Masters final against her world No 2 is a bewildering thought.

Swiatek’s ability to convert a single break or a lead of a few games into immovable dominance is her calling card. She is less seasoned in coming through tight matches — not because of an inability to do so, but because her ability is so high that she rarely finds herself ever needing to think about it, except against her nearest rivals. This was a statement victory in a match that saw both players peak in one of the best contests on the WTA Tour in recent years and was as good an advertisement for the quality of women’s tennis in 2024 as fans and tournament organisers could want.

It was a final that deserved to go as far as it possibly could. It did. Swiatek prevailed. “It’s going to give me some wisdom,” she said afterwards.

How will tennis resolve its struggle between decorum and drama?

It’s not exactly heart-stopping news to mention that folks around tennis can get a little hung up on decorum. All whites at Wimbledon. “Quiet, please.” Better not say a bad word on the court. Fans only get to reclaim their seats every other game. And on and on.

So there was quite a dust-up last week when Pedro Cachin, a journeyman from Argentina, asked Rafael Nadal for one of his sweaty playing shirts following their three-hour, three-set duel that Nadal won, 6-1, 6-7, 6-3.

That’s simply not done in tennis.

True, it doesn’t happen often, but is it a big deal? Cachin, who is 29, said playing against Nadal had been “a dream”. He wanted the kind of memento footballers get all the time. He is thinking of framing the shirt and putting it on his wall at…