Alex de Minaur channels his inner-Nadal to crank up intensity at US Open | Simon Cambers

ALex de Minaur saw Rafael Nadal up close earlier this year when he faced him on clay in back-to-back tournaments. One win and one loss was a healthy return for the Australian on Nadal’s favoured surface, even though the 22-time Grand Slam champion was still fresh from injury at the time. But as he continues to navigate the US Open draw, it’s Nadal’s philosophy that helps de Minaur impose himself on his opponents.

It was in 2012, when assessing Andy Murray’s defeat to Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open semifinals, that Nadal offered insight into the attitude that made him such a formidable competitor. Murray had led Djokovic two sets to one, but suffered a physical and mental dip in the fourth set. He recovered in the fifth set, but Djokovic held on to reach the final. Murray’s mistake was to let Djokovic get away when he had the momentum.

“Winning two sets against one… winning 7-6, to win a tournament like this and to play against a player like Djokovic, you can’t start the fourth set like this,” he said. “It’s the moment to play with more intensity than ever, not to start with 3-0 down and two breaks in five minutes. That way you lose the match. You want to win the tournament, you can’t start – you can lose, the other can beat you – but you can’t lose at the beginning. When the other has more doubts, is in real trouble, [can’t] “Make it easier than it should be, right?”

De Minaur is cut from the same cloth. While a Pete Sampras or a Boris Becker used to saunter through their service games, only taking their opponent’s serve as the set neared its end, De Minaur fights for every point, runs for every lost cause, and tears across the court as if his life depended on it. It’s an attitude and philosophy based on the belief that he can outlast his opponents physically, which also gives him a mental edge, as happened in his third-round win over Dan Evans when the Briton’s hip seized up early in the third set.

“I knew beforehand, and it didn’t matter what the score was, that I was going to let him play until the end,” De Minaur said. “I was going to fight until the end. I knew he clearly had a lot of hours in his legs. And realistically, I was backing myself in a physical fight. I knew from the beginning, [it] It didn’t matter what happened during the match, whether I won or lost, I knew I was going to stay positive. I was going to extend rallies, I was going to move him around the court and if he was going to beat me today, he was going to have to go through me, and that was always going to show.”

With Carlos Alcaraz gone, De Minaur is the highest-ranked player in his section of the draw and is a heavy favourite to beat another Australian, Jordan Thompson, when they play on Monday (Tuesday AEST). With Britain’s Jack Draper or Czech Tomas Machac on the horizon, a semi-final spot is well within his grasp, a scenario even he would not have predicted at the start of the tournament, having not played since Wimbledon, where he was forced to withdraw from his quarter-final against Novak Djokovic with a hip injury. Before playing Evans, he had said he was probably 80-85% fit; now his rating is closer to 100%.

With three men in the last 16 for the first time since 1988 – Alexei Popyrin plays Frances Tiafoe – this is the first all-Australian fourth-round clash at the US Open since Wally Masur played Jamie Morgan in 1993. Thompson, who is in the fourth round of a Slam for the second time, showed he can live with top-10 players by beating Hubert Hurkacz earlier in the tournament and there is no way de Minaur will allow himself to take anything for granted against a man he regards almost as a big brother, someone he looked up to as a kid in Sydney.

“I think Tommy deserves a lot of respect as a player and not just because he’s in the fourth round, which he’s earned by beating some really good opponents, but just the way he’s gone about it over the last couple of years, career highs, playing positive, aggressive tennis against the best players in the world and taking a lot of big scalps,” he said. “It’s great that Aussie tennis, we’re showing what we can do. We’re putting ourselves in the deep end of tournaments. And look, it’s a good problem to have the fact that we’re playing each other in the fourth round. It’s exciting. I’ve obviously grown up with him. We’ve played a lot and I’m expecting an absolute battle.”