Watch the Australian Open with live streams of every court at 9Now. Click here to start watching!<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n Nadal's press conference was held shortly before the night session, which had been set to see Greek No.6 seed Stefanos Tsitsipas face Italian No.9 seed Matteo Berrettini.<\/p>\n That match was called off when Berrettini pulled out with an abdominal strain he had suffered in his third-round win over Karen Khachanov, handing Tsitsipas a walkover.<\/p>\n But that wasn't public knowledge when Nadal took a seat for his post-match press conference.<\/p>\n The chat with reporters began in typical fashion, but when Nadal was asked about his form in his straight-sets win against Fognini, he unwittingly dropped the Berrettini bombshell.<\/p>\n "I need to make another step forward against Tsitsipas," Nadal said, before stalling.<\/p>\n "Is it official? He'll play tonight … Okay. Well, I don't know, maybe.<\/p>\n "I think I heard that Berrettini was a little bit injured but not official at all."<\/p>\n Nadal then let out a nervous laugh before continuing.<\/p>\n "Sorry for that … but yeah, something … well, I messed it up," Nadal said.<\/p>\n The official Australian Open Twitter account then broke the news of Tsitsipas' walkover seconds later.<\/p>\n But the officials had been beaten to the news by the most unlikely of newsbreakers, Rafael Nadal.<\/p>\n For a daily dose of the best of the breaking news and exclusive content from Wide World of Sports, subscribe to our newsletter by<\/strong><\/em> clicking here!<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Superstar Spaniard Rafael Nadal has long mesmerised the tennis world with his eccentric mannerisms behind the microphone, but the 20-time Grand Slam champion could be […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35117"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35119,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35117\/revisions\/35119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Australian](\"https:\/\/vms-network-images-prod.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com\/2021\/02\/342889\/pickerImage.jpg\")
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