From 2012 until 2017, however, the Spaniard failed to make it out of the fourth round in South West London. <\/p>\n
He lost to world number 100, Lukas Rosol, at the 2012 event, and in 2013 he fell in the first round to Steve Darcis, ranked 135th. <\/p>\n
After bowing out to a young Nick Kyrgios<\/a> at Wimbledon<\/a> in 2014, Nadal\u2019s second-round opponent in 2015 was Dustin Brown<\/a>, who had already beaten the king of clay before. <\/p>\n At the Halle Open in 2014, Brown defeated the 22-time major champion in straight sets 6-4, 6-1.<\/p>\n A year later, the two met for the second time, and the Jamaican went into the bout feeling confident.<\/p>\n He recalled on the \u2018Changeover Podcast\u2019: \u201cI was thinking that I can win if I do the same thing, obviously, I have to believe that I can win the match, and I need to do the same thing [as in Halle].<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is, am I going to be able to do that because at the end of the day it\u2019s really high-risk tennis, and I\u2019ve got to do that to take him out of his comfort zone and not make any mistakes doing it.<\/p>\n \u201cOr doing more winners and not as many unforced errors, which is very difficult.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cI remember that I was in a locker room before and they asked me: \u2018Hey, do you want to go and see the court?\u2019 I was like: \u2018No. I\u2019m not trying to deal with these nerves now. I\u2019ll just go deal with it when I get out there. So I\u2019ll just kick back in the locker room.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cBecause before that point, I\u2019d never been on Centre Court. I\u2019ve never watched a match on Centre Court.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, I was like, \u2018I\u2019ll deal with that once I go out,\u2019 and I guess what helped is that I played against Rafa before in 2014 so I didn\u2019t have to deal as much with who I\u2019m playing against.<\/p>\n \u201cBut more like going out and like taking it all in and obviously being on Arthur Ashe before and other big courts, it helped, but it\u2019s still a lot when it\u2019s Wimbledon and it\u2019s packed.\u201d<\/p>\n Rafael Nadal\u2019s explanation for his poor run at Wimbledon between 2012 and 2017<\/p>\n Featuring on the \u2018Served<\/a>\u2018 podcast with Andy Roddick<\/a> in March, Nadal explained his disappointing results at Wimbledon in the mid-2010s.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThere arrived a point that I was not able to play anymore on grass for a lot of years\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like I forgot to play on grass, it\u2019s simply that my knees were not holding; I was not able to slow down.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDuring this period of time, that were very important years of my tennis career, my knees didn\u2019t allow me to play on grass.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, it was painful because I felt that my chances were bigger, if I was healthy enough, on grass than hard.<\/p>\n Nadal finally found his feet on the grass courts of Wimbledon once again in 2018, when he reached the semi-finals. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a large portion of the 2010s, Rafael Nadal really struggled at Wimbledon, crashing out in the early…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,21596,7627,82,593,614],"class_list":{"0":"post-27167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-dustin-brown","11":"tag-rafael-nadal","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-tennis","14":"tag-wimbledon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Rafael](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/GettyImages-479249282-1024x682.jpg\")
Photo credit should read GLYN KIRK\/AFP via Getty ImagesDustin Brown\u2019s victory over Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2015<\/p>\n