Henman and Wilander on Nadal 'nightmare' defeat at Australian Open: "It was horrible to see"

Eurosport tennis analysts Tim Henman and Mats Wilander reacted emotionally towards Nadal's exit from the Australian Open because it was hard to watch.

Nadal was not capable to play tennis but he opted to do it anyways as he was the defending champion and he didn't want to exit with a retirement. He fought bravely and for a while hung on but in the end, the injury was too much to handle. Moving was a problem for Nadal as he couldn't catch the balls in order to play them.

Henman said:

“Mackenzie McDonald deserves a lot of credit because he was up on that baseline and the one dictating, which was kind of the outcome. It was horrible to see – we’ve seen Nadal deal with so many injuries during his career, but on this stage after his performance 12 months ago, to suddenly pull up.

He added:

"When he pulled up that sharply we thought the writing was on the wall, but McDonald still had to keep his focus, and at the end of the day, he deserved his victory. It is one of those nightmare injuries. The game is physical for everyone and movement is important, but when you get that sharp pain, it’s not good news because you think you’ve pulled something. We were watching and thinking this is not looking good. It’s a sad sight.”

Wilander echoed similar thoughts on the situation albeit with a more technical approach:

“There’s a lot of bad luck involved when you get injured, but you have to look at what happened and Rafa got pushed out to his forehand corner a little too much because of Mackenzie’s inside-out forehand. Rafa has to run for it, and eventually, he gets hurt so in my eyes it’s a technical knockout, probably because we’re watching a man who is 36 years old and hasn’t played enough matches, but it’s down to a lot of bad luck, obviously."

He also added:

“No one got a hip flexor [injury] in the 80s as the game wasn’t quick enough. There were times when you ran 100 per cent for something, but the steps in between shots were never explosive enough to hurt yourself. The game today is so different and it can happen at any time. It’s so much faster and you need to push off immediately, and there is a lot of luck involved.”