India’s Nagal Summit (AP/PTI) Bengaluru: Sumit Nagal dropped the bag and stared at it for a moment before reaching for his rackets. He could barely look at the graphite sticks. A part of him wanted to wipe them out. The 28-year-old had just lost in straight sets to France’s Geoffrey Blancaneaux in the first round of the ATP Challenger tournament in Lyon in early June. It was a defeat that stung – Nagal had not dropped a set in four previous meetings with Blancaneaux.
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Sensing a storm brewing inside the Indian No.1, coach Sascha Nensel stepped in. Grabbing the bag, he told Nagal to take a break and simply walk off the tennis court. “Those back-to-back tournaments in Heilbronn and Lyon were bad,” Nagal says six months later, leaning forward in his seat in a luxury hotel in Bengaluru. “I played such bad tennis. I missed, I made a lot of mistakes. I hit the ball but I don’t know where it goes. It’s the worst place for a tennis player. Lyon was at the bottom.” From there, Nagal and Yash Pandey, a friend and sports physiotherapist, drove almost 370 km to the Swiss resort of Interlaken. Over the next five days, the duo traversed the Bernese Alps. They talked occasionally and the weight that Nagal was carrying in the first half of 2025 slowly began to lift. The collapse had consequences. Nagal’s ranking dropped out of the top 300 in the second half of last year, pushing him even out of the qualifying fields for Grand Slams. The slide was steep because it came at the end of his best season yet, when he climbed to a career-high No. 68. In a sport where the number next to the name becomes a player’s identity, the drop meant Nagal, ranked 277th this week, will miss the Australian Open from January 18 for the first time in two years. Instead, he will begin his 2026 campaign next week in Bengaluru at the ATP 125 Challenger where he will hope to return to the top 100. “You’re in the top 100, you’re not playing well, and in four months you’re 180,” says Nagal. “No one likes to be 300. The tournaments are very different, the prize money is different. The hardest thing for me was that I didn’t play at the level I wanted to. The mental part is also a challenge, you struggle with motivation.” The low temperature in early 2025 disrupted Nagala’s plan. It didn’t help that he didn’t have much of a preseason. “Going forward, I’m going to do four to six weeks of prep, play one league at most, because that’s what works best for my body and my game,” he says. Some mistakes, Nagal admits, have led to inexperience at this level. “It was the first time I was 68 in the world,” he says. “There were a few games when I was 80 or 90 that I could have been better at. It was a learning experience.” At 5-foot-11, Nagal relies heavily on his legs and all-around consistency. In retrospect, he feels he should have put the rockets away for even a week when his mental focus began to slip. “I should have come home, for some love and ghar ka khana – mooli parathas, cheeni roti…” he says with a laugh, his eyes lighting up.
