Attention all tennis fans! I'm sure you've noticed a huge gap in our sport for the last 3 months… Rafa. It's been almost 12 weeks without him, and a lot's happened since. Tsonga won Toronto, Li Na retired, and Marin Cilic won a grand slam. Some crazy stuff's happened.
Every day of the summer I've been keeping my fingers crossed for good news. There's been bad news, potential good news, rumours and all, but I can now confidently say: Rafa's coming home.
I'm absolutely ecstatic. It's been an emotional few weeks.
On 15th September, Toni Nadal said that 'Rafa's backhand is on 80%. He will be ready for Astana, Beijing and Shanghai. The rest of the season will stay as planned' It happened to be my birthday on that day, and you know what? Best birthday present EVER.
(I've waited a few days before I released this news just to make sure it's reliable and official. What Toni announces is normally accurate, but I didn't want to give anyone false hope.)
Rafa's been hitting an increasing number of powerful 2 handed back hands, and it's been a while since he's been seen with the splint. The recovery obviously took longer than we expected, but this is Rafa remember, his body doesn't like to recover quickly…!
First Rafa will play an exhibition match in Astana, Kazakhstan against Tsonga on 25th September at 7pm. That's 2pm GMT.
Next it's Beijing. Starting on 29th September, the ATP 500 tournament should be a good practice before Shanghai and Paris.
Rafa has lost a lot of ranking points to widen the gap between himself and Djokovic, and Federer is very close behind. However, Rafa has very little points to defend in Asia, so if he can play to a good level, hopefully he can try to secure the end of year number 2 ranking. (Roger is number 2 in the race currently.)
Health is the most important thing. All I want right now is for Rafa to be back on tour, playing pain free, and it looks like that will happen.
I'm so incredibly excited to see him back on court very soon.
Get ready everyone, the king's returning.
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