Rafael Nadal makes startling injury admission as he prepares to make Wimbledon return

For the first time in three years, Rafael Nadal walked into a Wimbledon press conference. And that, apparently, was a victory in itself.

‘First of all,’ he said when asked about his foot injury. ‘I can walk normal most of the days… almost every single day.’

It seemed an extraordinary statement from a man proposing to compete in a Grand Slam tennis tournament, but if there is one thing Nadal is not, it is ordinary.

The 36-year-old Spaniard, playing at Wimbledon for the first time since 2019, suffers from Mueller-Weiss syndrome, a chronic foot condition.

He managed the pain during the French Open by the drastic process of daily injections to completely numb his left foot. He won his 14th title but left Paris on crutches, vowing that the regimen of deadening jabs could not continue.

At that stage his participation at Wimbledon looked unlikely but here he is, having undergone radiofrequency treatment to numb the nerve a little more permanently.

‘Things are going better,’ he said. ‘If not, I would not be here.

‘There is a couple of things that are so important for me: first of all, the main issue, when I wake up, I don’t have this pain that I was having for the last year and a half.

‘And second thing, practising. In the last two weeks, I had not one of these terrible days that I can’t move at all. Some days better; some days a little bit worse. The overall feelings are positive.’

Asked how long this nerve-numbing effect will last, he could only say: ‘I can’t tell you if it’s going to be for one week, for two days, or for three months.

‘The treatment didn’t fix my injury, it didn’t improve my injury at all, but it can take out a little bit of the pain.

‘Sometimes in the medical world, things are not predictable 100 per cent. But in theory the nerve is asleep in some way for a while. So how long the nerve is going to be that way, I can’t tell you.’ So Nadal will continue to live life on a knife edge, awaiting the day when that nerve awakens and the pain bites again.

Until then there is no reason to assume he will do anything other than continue to win tennis matches. He looked sharp in an exhibition event at the Hurlingham Club this week and the Wimbledon draw —beginning with Argentina’s Francisco Cerundolo on Tuesday — has been kind to him.

Having also won the Australian Open in January he is halfway towards completing a calendar year Grand Slam which, given his physical issues, would surely rank as the most astonishing achievement in tennis history.

That remains an extremely long shot, with Novak Djokovic No 1 seed and heavy favourite. What Djokovic shares with Nadal is an ability to compartmentalise, to block out unhelpful thoughts or emotions to a degree beyond most human beings.

It is that trait, Nadal suggested, which allows him to play with what appears to be a ticking time bomb for a left foot.

‘I have had a lot of problems in my life in terms of injury,’ he said. ‘If I have some pain, I am not going on court thinking, “OK, how is it going to be today?”

‘No, I am positive. I think I’m going to be fine. Then if something goes wrong, we need to accept it.

‘You can’t compete and be thinking all the time, “What happens if the pain comes back?” because then you are not focused on what you have to do.

‘I think I was good at managing that during my career.’