Rafael Nadal v Lukas Rosol

Upsets in Tennis do happen on a semi regular basis, especially amongst the lower level players but amongst the elite they are incredibly rare. The top Tennis players today are just that much ahead of the rest that upset's, especially at Grandslams, come around once in a blue moon. When they happen however they are notable and deserve to be treat like massive news, at least in the sporting world.

As we all know Tennis has 4 Grandslams a year. The first of is the Australia Open held on a Plexicushion (hard) surface, the second is held on Clay in France at Roland Garros, the third is held at Wimbledon on Grass and the final is the US Open held on DecoTurf (hard).

As we went into Wimbledon 2012 we had already seen both Novak Djokovic (Australian Open) and Rafael Nadal (Roland Garros) claim a slam each as the two men battled for the #1 ranking in the world. Those two were were seen as the top contenders for Wimbledon, with former 6 time champion Rodger Federer also seen as being in contention alongside Britain's own Andy Murray.

What no one expected was that one of the supposed "big 4" would fail to at least make it to the quarter finals. At the quarter final stage the likes of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Tomas Berdych, David Ferrer and Janko Tipsarevic were expected to at least put up a fight with the big 4 with maybe one of them scoring a victory. Amazingly however Rafael Nadal didn't even get beyond the second round as he was stunned in the biggest upset of the Tennis year by the unknown Lukas Rosol.

The 26 year old Rosol was ranked around #100 and seen as early round fodder for Nadal. Prior to 2012 Rosol had never even made it past the 1st qualifying stage at Wimbledon, and had in fact only made it to the main draw in 4 of his previous 18 attempts at Grandslams. Despite having been on the circuit for a few years Rosol had never been ranked in the top 60 and actually had a notable losing career record.

Rosol made an unexpectedly solid start against Nadal taking the Spaniard to a tie-breaker in the opening round before finally losing  the tie breaker 11-9. This should really have set alarm bells ringing around the Tennis world that Rosol wasn't just coming into the match to make up the numbers. It wasn't that Nadal was playing bad but Rosol was playing excellently and was really holding his own.

You could see that Rosol's confidence was growing as the match went on and in set 2 the Czech exceeded all expectation and not equaled Nadal but actually won the set 6-4. The Czech then surprisingly claimed the 3rd set to take a 2-1 lead. He was pushing Nadal to the limit but still it was expected that Nadal would fight back and that's just what the long haired Spaniard did as he claimed the 4th set 6-2.

Going into the final set some on forums were saying that Rosol had bottled it and Nadal had finally started to show his class. Instead the loss of the 4th set seemed to set Rosol back to his best as he remarkably held his nerve to clinch the 5th and final set 6-4, winning the match 6-7, 6-4, 6-4, 2-6, 6-4.

Before the match Nadal was 1/100, a nailed on certainty, he had moved to 1/250 at one point (if not even shorter odds) it was all but certain that Nadal would win but Rosol's serve (which scored an amazing 22 aces!) refused to yield and we had what many will remember as the greatest Tennis upset in recent memory. 

Sadly for Rosol he was beaten in straight sets in his next match by German Philipp Kohlschreiber (the 27 seed) and then failed to make the US Open losing to Argentinian Guido Pella in the 3rd round of Qualifying.

Picture thanks to Su--May