Nadal kept his roll going in the fourth set, and then, after a few more shifts in momentum, he found himself serving for the title at 5-4 in the fifth. Even at that stage, though, anyone familiar with his Aussie Open history knew it was going to be tough for him to block out the past and turn a miraculous comeback into a miraculous win. Those two five-set defeats weighed heavily on him. Too heavily, it seemed. Serving at 5-4, 30-0, he pulled up on a forehand and sent it long, double faulted, and drilled an easy backhand into the net to give the break back.
Was Rafa destined, every five years, to lose in maximally devastating fashion in an Australian Open final? He seemed to think so, as he told the BBC, in comical fashion, later.
“I said, ‘F*ck, one more time, break up in the fifth, I gonna lose the advantage again like in 2012 and 2017,’” Rafa said. Then he told himself, “I can lose the match, or he can beat me, but I can’t give up, even if I am destroyed mentally.”
This time there were two things in Rafa’s game that saved him, one old and one relatively new.
The first was his well-known ability to break back, to leave a bad service game behind and dig back in right away. After giving away his serve at 5-4, Nadal won the opening point at 5-5 with a forehand pass. He followed that with a backhand pass, and kept enough balls in play to make Medvedev eventually miss a forehand at break point.