Rafa Nadal won a second successive Madrid Open title when Kei Nishikori was forced to retire in the third set of Sunday’s final with an apparent back injury.<\/p>\n
Nishikori, the 10th seed and one of the game’s rising talents, made a blistering start on Nadal’s favoured clay to win the first set 6-2 and was a break up in the second and serving at 4-3 when disaster struck.<\/p>\n
After a long rally with the score at 15-30, the Japanese pulled up clutching his back and Nadal went on to win the game and the set 6-4 to force a decider.<\/p>\n
In a tremendously disappointing finish to an entertaining encounter, Nishikori could barely walk to the net to capitulate after Nadal had raced into a 3-0 lead in the third.<\/p>\n
“First of all I am very disappointed about what happened today in this final,” Nishikori told spectators packed into the Magic Box arena.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, I was hurting already and I tried to fight but Rafa was too good today so congratulations to him,” added the 24-year-old, contesting his first Masters 1000 final and fresh from his debut title on clay in Barcelona last month.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a great few weeks for me in Spain,” he said. “I won in Barcelona and now here the final in Madrid so it’s becoming like a second home to me.”<\/p>\n
Source: AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rafa Nadal won a second successive Madrid Open title when Kei Nishikori was forced to retire in the third set of Sunday’s final with an apparent back injury. Nishikori, the 10th seed and one of the game’s rising talents, made a blistering start on Nadal’s favoured clay to win the first set 6-2 and was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":17937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29,3,565],"class_list":["post-17933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-dr-mahamudu-bawumia","tag-ghana-news","tag-messi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}