Rafael Nadal, who is struggling to get any match practice before the Australian Open, will play an exhibition event at Melbourne Park in the week leading up to the season opening grand slam, organisers said on Monday.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old Spaniard has not played since he withdrew from the season-ending World Tour Finals in London in November with a knee injury.<\/p>\n
He had already withdrawn from an exhibition tournament in Abu Dhabi, this week\u2019s Brisbane International and another event in Sydney, citing a lack of time to properly prepare.<\/p>\n
However, the 16-times grand slam winner will be part of the winner-takes all Tie Break Tens event at Melbourne Park on Jan. 10, five days before the Australian Open begins.<\/p>\n
\u201cTie Break Tens is a great concept and we will see and play some exciting matches,\u201d Nadal said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe field is fantastic and I expect some tough competition which will be great for the Aussie fans.\u201d<\/p>\n
The eight-man field includes Novak Djokovic, three-time grand slam winner Stan Wawrinka, Australia\u2019s Nick Kyrgios, and former world number one Lleyton Hewitt.<\/p>\n
Each match is comprised solely of super tie breaks to 10 points. The knockout tournament provides a winner take-all purse of $250,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really will be an intriguing contest,\u201d Australian Open Tournament Director Craig Tiley said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rafael Nadal, who is struggling to get any match practice before the Australian Open, will play an exhibition event at Melbourne Park in the week leading up to the season opening grand slam, organisers said on Monday. The 31-year-old Spaniard has not played since he withdrew from the season-ending World Tour Finals in London in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16786,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16787,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16785\/revisions\/16787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}