Rafael Nadal - Australian Open Tennis

Spaniard Rafael Nadal is the number two ranked player in the world and has been for the last 147 weeks. He has won the French Open on the last four occasions and has yet to taste defeat at the Roland Gaross. In each of the last three finals, he has beaten, World Number One, Roger Federer, only giving the world number one four games in 2008. To the surprise of many, Rafael has beaten Federer in eleven of their seventeen encounters. Admitted all those victories, with the exception of one, came on clay courts, a surface that Nadal is proving unbeatable on. Federer has much the better record on hard court and that’s why he would be favourite over Nadal to win here. However, Nadal is improving and he is most certainly becoming hungrier for the Number One spot - he can go a long way in achieving that here at the Australian Open, where he was a semi finalist last year.

When winning his first French Open, Nadal defeated Federer in the Semi-final, thus preventing Federer from potentially achieving a career Grand Slam. He was also only the 7th player to win a Grand Slam at his first attempt and he was the 2nd player to do this at Roland Gaross.

Nadal is clearly a phenomenon, he is still only 22 years old. He is the only teenager, other than Boris Becker and Bjorn Borg, to have been ranked number two player in the world.

On the downside and a reason why backers may not be betting on him at the Australian Open is that he has yet to win a Tennis Grand Slam Event on anything other than clay.