Rafael Nadal faces five-month layoff after exploratory hip operation

Rafael Nadal faces a five-month recovery period after Friday’s exploratory operation on his troublesome hip.

The 14-time French Open champion has already said that he is writing the rest of this season off, and hopes to come back for one last journey around the world’s biggest tournaments next year.

The results from his doctors – which were released on Saturday afternoon – sounded encouraging on this front, suggesting that his race as a competitive tennis player may not yet be run.

Stand by for some complex medical terminology. According to Nadal’s spokesman, “The surgery consisted of cleaning the fibrotic and degenerated areas of the tendon both proximal and distal, as well as suturing it to adequately reinforce it.

“An old injury to the labrum of his left hip was also regularised, which will surely help the tendon evolve better.”

Hips can be notoriously difficult to repair, as Andy Murray will tell you. Unlike the knee, the hip is a closed ball-and-socket joint, and the labrum is the leathery flap of cartilage that sits over the top, holding the whole thing together.

It was a labrum tear that finished off Greg Rusedski’s career in 2007, but Nadal’s issues sound – in theory – as though they should be manageable. The next question is whether other parts of his body might rebel when he starts to ramp up his physical workload in preparation for a comeback.

His knees have often been an issue over the last decade or more, requiring PRP (platelet-rich plasma) therapy to keep them operating. His foot is afflicted by a degenerative condition called Mueller-Weiss syndrome, and he needed to put a nerve to sleep last year in order to play Wimbledon. But his appetite for the game remains.

“I don’t think I deserve to end like this,” said Nadal a week before the start of this year’s French Open, as he announced that he would not be able to play the tournament for the first time since 2004. “I’ve worked hard enough throughout my career for my end not to be in a press conference.”