Rafa Nadal refused to make excuses for his shock defeat by Diego Schwartzman in the quarter-finals of the Italian Open, insisting that his focus is now on fine-tuning his game ahead of the French Open which begins Sept. 27. The nine-time Rome champion looked well off the pace in his 6-2 7-5 loss to the 15th-ranked Argentine, an opponent Rafael Nadal had defeated nine straight times heading into Saturday’s encounter in the Italian capital.
“We can find excuses, but I didn`t play well enough. Then we have to think internally, ‘Why? How I can fix it?’” the 34-year-old Spaniard told reporters. “Now is not the moment to find excuses. It`s just to accept that I didn’t play well enough. It was not my night. He played a great match, I think, and I didn’t. These things can happen. After such a long time without competing, I played two good matches, and now I played a bad…
