This is Casper Ruud, the methodical antidive who challenges his teacher Nadal

• Final Rafa Nadal and a challenge against himself in Paris

• Rafa Nadal "If they gave me a new foot, I would prefer to lose the final"

• Moyà "Every match he saves, Nadal becomes a new player"

Voices of the highest credit count that upon his return this year to Buenos Aires, the city where in 2020 he won the first of his eight titles,

(Oslo, 1998) was that he was assigned the same driver as then.

Moderate the trial.

It was not a whim, but one more example of the methodicality of a young man who is as orderly on and off the pitch.

The boy went back to the restaurants from the first time and replicated each of the routines that led to his first professional success.

Before, he was the most flexible when it came to negotiating the fixed amount that he was going to be paid as the top star of the poster and exhibited with all the tournament employees the correct and delicate treatment that also characterizes him in his way of conceiving tennis. .

He won again, beating Diego Schwartzman from Buenos Aires in the final.

"He comes out with a plan and fulfills it," Juan José Moro, a Radio Rivadavia legend, who covered his first Grand Slam tournament in this same tournament, back in 1974

. He's made a lot of progress since we last saw him play there.

He is a very precise tennis player, who shoots well on the lines.

A neat player.

Let's say that he would be the antithesis of

», He continues.

The most explicit manifestation of the advances of who was number 1 junior is his debut in the final of a Grand Slam, a few months after falling to Carlos Alcaraz in the Masters 1000 in Miami.

San Diego is his only conquest on fast surface.

"He has won more matches than anyone on clay, but it is also true that until now he had not met Nadal due to the Spaniard's injuries," says

, a journalist from

with more than 160 Grand Slam tournaments behind him.

No experience or pressure

"There are two obvious factors that favor Rafa: his experience and the support of the public. It is his first final in a major, but it is also true that he has nothing to lose. Anything that is to win one of the first two sets and take the game over three hours will play in their favor," he adds.

Ruud, who will jump from eighth to sixth place in the ranking, speaks Spanish well.

Since 2018 he has spent periods at Nadal's tennis academy in Manacor and maintains an excellent relationship with his rival today and with everyone around him.

"When he arrived here he was 140-150 in the world and today he is one of the best. He has done an extraordinary job with his father and we are proud of this collaboration. And on top of that we are lucky to have worked with one of the players educated on the professional circuit,"

, director of the academy, said on Saturday.

His father and his trainer,

, rose to 39th in the rankings in 1990, but never managed to win a title.

"Now he will no longer be able to say that he is the most important tennis player in Norwegian history," Casper joked when he won in 2020 in Buenos Aires.

"When he arrived he was still quite young and had a wide margin for improvement. Our first objective was to get him into the

", says

, who closely supervises his preparation, together with his father, when he is in the academy in Manacor, especially in the pre-season and during the European clay court tournaments.

"He is very calm and hard-working, well focused on the aspects of his game that he needs to improve and on a day-to-day basis," adds Clar, who agrees with Moyà's assessment that we are dealing with one of the few clay specialists left in The circuit.

"He is based on a ball style with a lot of weight and from the back of the court, quite similar to Rafa's," he adds.

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