Culture

Why Federer should have won

July 08, 2008
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There can be no doubt about it: sport does not get any better. Sunday's battle was the greatest Wimbledon final of all time, the perfect match in every respect except one: the wrong man won. My admittedly biased view (I'm a Federer fan) is that poetic justice, and the narrative arc of the match, would have been better served by Federer, and not Nadal, triumphing in the dying light. Here are five reasons why:

1) Comebacks make for the best sporting stories, and a victory for Federer would have been the most remarkable of comebacks, eclipsing Murray's against Gasquet in the fourth round.

2) The greatest sporting performances are those in which a player reveals, in the course of a match, qualities that no one suspected them of possessing. Nadal didn't reveal anything new during Sunday's final; we knew before it started that he was a player of machine-like strength and consistency, able to maintain a certain level of performance whatever the situation. But few people could have suspected that Federer was capable of such bloody-mindedness, such courageous determination to stay in a match that he should have lost in three sets. Steeliness isn't a quality one associates with Federer, largely because he has never had much need for it; his talents mean that he has rarely had to fight.

3) Federer is, though only 26, like the king whose grip on power is waning. He clearly does not feel ready to hand over power, and there is something both heroic and tragic about the spectacle of him clinging so desperately on. It matters, of course, that Federer is such a likeable king; few people felt much sadness, for example, when Sampras was toppled. It would have been a glorious act of defiance had Federer managed to resist Nadal's onslaught.

4) Surely a player as great as Federer deserved to beat Borg's record. In many ways, he has been unlucky that his career has overlapped with Nadal's - the best ever clay court player. Had it not done so, he would surely have won at least two grand slams by now, equalling Rod Laver's record. So it seems almost cruel that Federer should have been denied the chance to break Borg's record as well.

5) Federer's backhand passing shot to save the second match point in the fourth set tie-break was so brilliant, in the circumstances (and remember his backhand hadn't been working very well up to that point in the match), that it alone deserved to win him the title.