Mateo Berrettini is reckoned a certainty in the last eight at majors, Lorenzo Musetti and Jannik Sinner have broken into the ATP top 10 and Lorenzo Sonego is within touching distance.
Tennis is booming in Italy.
It’s Open Season. No Italian has seen the shimmer of a men’s singles Grand Slam title in 46 years, and this pack has begun the chase.
In this race is 19-year-old Luca Nardi who has earned praise from Stefanos Tsitsipas and Cameron Norrie. Ranked World No. 164, Nardi, may not be leading the pack but has the prize in sight.
Currently the youngest Italian in the ATP top 200, he has some ground to cover but his performances over recent months have made him a breakout candidate.
Despite the daunting task at hand, there’s an air of composure around Nardi, an ease with which he goes about things.
He reached the shores of Chennai on Saturday morning but stepped out for his first practice session only on Sunday evening.
Here too, there were none of the orderly stretching exercises that one finds a tennis player indulging in.
Instead, after a few brisk forward lunges, he pulled out a small football from his bag and passed it around with his coach Gabriele Constantini.
“Actually, he’s the coach,” Constantini laughed from a distance. The roughly 10-minute spell had ample room for banter between the two. The camaraderie of a player-coach duo who has worked through the formative years was evident.
“I like to do things other than tennis too. I do not like to always be focused on tennis only,” Nardi said. Football perhaps found its turn with Nardi for his favourite team Napoli’s stellar recent form.
Nardi could easily be on the ATP Tour. He has outings at ATP 250 events from time to time. His insistence, though, with the Challengers is down to neat planning.
“We decide tournament by tournament. We plan for the next month. The aim is to play as much as possible on the ATP Tour. But since I need to have a good ranking, I play some Challengers as well for points,” Nardi said.
It was at the Astana Open, an ATP 250 event, in October last year that Nardi gave a glimpse of his range. If his conduct in Chennai mistakenly gives a sense of nonchalance, his time at the tournament put forth his intensity.
Nardi bettered David Goffin in the qualifiers and made his way to the second round where he met Tsitsipas.
The ability to engage in endless rallies and brisk end-to-end movement, mixed with some nifty net play saw Nardi push the Greek to the limit. He holed out in the tiebreaks in both sets and conceded the match 7-6, 7-6 but he earned the praise that followed.
“He can play very well in the future,” the Australian Open 2023 runner-up had opined.
But that outing in Astana changed nothing. Not his aim, not his expectations. “Maybe, a little,” Nardi said about an increase in attention on him. “But I don’t take extra pressure,” he promptly added.
Navigating the deep end of the ATP Tour on a full-time basis is not too far ahead on his timeline. “I’m trying to do the right things. I’m working hard. It takes time because every tournament is different. One week you can win the tournament and the next you’ll be out in the first round. I’m trying to do my best, so hopefully this year or the next,” Nardi said.
In the current crop of Italian players at the tour level are some of Nardi’s closest aides too. Musetti is a dear friend who he has known since the age of 12. The two mostly stick to conversions not relating to tennis, Nardi insists.
Sinner, two years senior, is the one he looks up to, and the others too are never shy of sharing time on the court.
“We are all good friends and at times we train together. I think that the first one, Sinner, is the best out of us. We are almost all similar in age. (But) He was the first one who made it big and everyone got the hope that if he can make it, I can too. So each of us pushes the other ones. That’s the best thing.”
While others in the pack have made a safe space in the top 50 ranks, Nardi has only flirted with the top 100 till now, 126 in November 2022 being his career-best. He’s got another set to pip first. The likes of Mattia Bellucci and Matteo Arnaldi are ranked higher. But tennis being tennis, a couple of strong performances could see Nardi breeze past.
With the intent of finding himself on the ATP Tour in the next year or two, a solid outing in Chennai would mark the perfect start.
“In January, I didn’t have the best of periods on the court so I want to get my level to my best,” Nardi said on his expectations from the Challenger where he is seeded fifth.
Nardi set out to Chennai to take home some valuable points, and pocketing the entire 100 with a fourth Challenger title might not be an improbable scenario.
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