∞ + 1

It feels wrong, I know, to mention Rafael Nadal right now, like someone standing up at that bit of the wedding where the priest asks the congregation if anyone knows of any reason why this union should not be blessed. I mean, you can do it, but you come across as a bit of a dickhead if you do. Roger Federer's praises have been sung since Sunday by one of the biggest choruses ever assembled, and it probably shook very heaven itself, so to bring Nadal into the discussion almost seems prosaic, or vulgar. But it bears doing.

I suggested after the Australian Open that the story of men's tennis in the immediate future would be how Federer dealt with his first usurper, the first and only player who knew The Secret; and whether, in doing this, he could touch the same, or higher, heights he had done in past, thus surpassing all his previous achievements. Federer's greatness has not been in question. Not even his status as the greatest of all time has been in question, at least not seriously enough for it to matter. People who watch much more tennis than me and have done for longer than I've been alive have been saying it for a while, and I ain't gainsaying that. The issue now is one of degree, of how superfabulous Federer is, and Nadal is at its heart. It will be in the head-on, high-stakes confrontations between the two (and pretty much all their confrontations are head-on and high-stakes) that this particular truth will reveal itself.


So Nadal's absence from the final week of the French Open — the first major since that epic in Melbourne — rendered the tournament somewhat bereft. A Federer-Nadal final would have taken on monstrous dimensions: Nadal's reputation as the master of clay and of Roland Garros, and as Federer's nemesis, versus Federer's quest for his fourteenth major title and a career Slam, and a chance to halt the Nadal juggernaut — or, to put it more simply, precisely and explosively, to beat Nadal in the French Open final. No Nadal meant that much of this intrigue disappeared.

Despite the consensus on Federer's place in history, this should not be shirked. Nadal is like a mountain — there. He can't be avoided. Federer effectively admitted as much after beating Robin Söderling. "I knew that the day Rafa wasn't in the final," he said, "I would be there and I would win." Federer's achievements are now in some part conditional on and must be read in the light of Nadal and Federer's struggle to overcome him. If he had played Nadal in the final, he would have had the occasion to do this to a huge extent — perhaps definitively. As it was, with Nadal already dispatched offstage (deservedly so, it should be restated), it became merely an opportunity for Federer to reaffirm his greatness.

Hang on — merely reaffirm his greatness?


I felt somewhat unmoved by the bare mathematics of Federer's win: the equalling of Pete Sampras' record, the completion of the full Slam set. It's as close to destiny as is possible in sport's disinterested, uninterested logic. Consider this: he has played in nineteen Grand Slam finals, of which he has won fourteen. Each of the five losses have been to Nadal. Now: imagine there's no Nadal (it's hard to do...but try). Even keeping in mind that history is an elusive bastard, it's not a stretch to believe that he would have long ago matched surpassed Sampras, that he would have long ago secured his career slam, that he would won at least one proper, full-on Grand Slam. Remembering that Nadal beat him in the semi-final of the 2005 French Open, Federer could have had — it's not such a wild supposition — twenty majors by now.

(...)

I know. Take a minute to catch your breath and recover what bits of your blown mind you can.

I realise I said above that we can't ignore Nadal. My point in presenting this counterfactual scenario is to highlight the sublimity of what Federer has done. He has been one "freak of nature from Mallorca" (to use Andre Agassi's description) away from those statistics that just made your eyeballs pop a couple of paragraphs ago. On some level, it was as if he has already achieved greatness that deserved those numbers, and that the numbers are just catching up. In a sense, Sunday didn't change anything, or reveal anything we didn't already know.

(By the way, I wish I could think of better words than "great" and "greatness" to describe the man, but though they are the most obvious, they are surely also the most apt.)

But perhaps such hypothetics and nebulous theology are best left to bloggers. The earthbound reality of Federer's triumph may have been philosophically symbolic (that is, if you follow my philosophical line on this), but symbols have significance. As the great (!) man himself said:

It's maybe my greatest victory — now and until the end of my career I can really play with my mind at peace, and no longer hear that I've never won Roland Garros.

And it's not as if, despite Federer's belief in his ability to win on seeing Nadal getting eliminated, it was easy. This was no procession; it was hard-earned. To quote (it's all the rage, dontcha know) commenter joao jorge:

...the story is not the winning of the tournament. It's the constant struggle of Federer to find his place in history. How, despite (and because) of Nadal's premature exit, every point he played carried an additional pressure. It was his shot at the title, and he did not fail.

Maybe this, achieved though it may have been with Nadal on a physio's table in Barcelona, was just as meaningful as slaying the Nadal dragon. It always impresses me how keenly aware Federer is of his own place in the history of the game. It's remarkable that he is able to step outside the weirdness that rapidly gathers around such talent and appreciate where he truly stands. It's not vanity — it's due reward.

It's still frustrating that we didn't get the final we wanted, the confluence of the two mightiest rivers. I deeply hope that the rivalry flowers like it can, like no other has. But at this stage, it's almost silly, greedy, decadent to curse whatever one curses for our apparent misfortune. We are privileged to witness this. It doesn't really matter what transpires from here because, ultimately, history has already been written. Greatness has spoken. Roger Federer is merely reaffirming it. He is merely adding to infinity.

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Söderdämmerung and the power of the powerless

Everyone bar the upset loves an upset. So inexorable does the fastening of sporting hierarchies seem that its disruption is always at least mildly shocking. It awakens the Marxist in us: tendance Karl, by allowing us a glimpse at what a proletariat uprising might look like; and, more importantly, tendance Groucho, by showing up the pomposity of the elite, like someone egging a cardinal.

Take, as I believe is obligatory when discussing this issue, the FA Cup. The Cup is running on the fumes of its history — fumes which, were they to irritate the right set of lungs, would result in the words THE MAGIC OF THE CUP being spelled out in phlegm on a Setanta studio backdrop. The upset is an irresistible part of Cup lore, key to understanding its appeal. Yet the mantra of "That's what the cup is all about" has become all too literal and tinged with desperation. The football landscape is being reshaped by would-be gods who are little more than children with who have found the dynamite. The FA Cup was the state religion. It has now been de facto disestablished. In the new football universe, the reel of old cup shocks becomes more like a holy relic whose dust is inhaled by the faithful each January.

A Cup upset these days does not mean what it did. It cannot. It can still mean plenty for those causing the upset. But the meaning for the competition as a whole is diminished when certain of its participants have more invested in other belief systems: only attend this particular church out of habit or duty, see it as to be endured, would rather concentrate on spending time at the lodge or trying to gain entry to a church they don't even want to be a member of so that their kids might get into a decent school. And when the big clubs have so little invested in it, they stand to lose little. So, while a shock is a blow struck for the smaller club, it barely registers on the face of the bigger club. What inherent value the Cup had is waning, and the injury to the giant is ever less real and ever more symbolic. The cardinal retires to his palace and washes the egg from his face in his gold-plated sink.



On Sunday, there was an upset at Roland Garros. I was going to post about it, but all I ended up with was:

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling? Defeated? Nadal?

Now here was an upset that mattered, like an earthquake. The distance between the FA Cup's mythology and its reality has never been greater — not merely because the competition's value has been devalued, but because of the concomitant retreat into ancestor worship and a belief in the magical properties of the Cup upset. The downgrading of the Cup and the superstitious faith in it tend ever more towards their respective extremes. Chelsea's defeat to Barnsley in last year's competition, for example, could never mean to them what it would have in times past. It certainly meant little next to their loss in the Champions League final. (The joke is only funny when the victim has something to lose.) And their successes in the 2007 and 2009 editions of the Oldest Competition would be as nothing next to a Champions League title, because that's what Chelsea (here standing in for any club of their stature, or with pretensions towards such stature) have opted to believe in. Söderling's win, meanwhile, was a candidate for Greatest Sporting Upset of the Decade because it struck at the very heart of the sport, and was more than just a fun but sideshowy happening.

True, the Söderling-Nadal match and a typical FA Cup upset share certain qualities, provoke certain similar responses. 'Upset' and 'shock' are virtually synonymous in sport, after all, and disorder is always fascinating. The disorder in the case of the tennis match lies in what remains of the tournament: a seething pot which may spit out in almost any direction. It lies in what feels like the interruption of a line of succession: Rafael V's coronation has been postponed. It lies in seeing something we're not supposed to see, something extraordinary.

And it is because of this quality, this extraordinariness, that, for this selfish sports fan, Nadal's defeat was a bad thing. Like everyone else who watched it, I was agog at how well Söderling played, at how he made Nadal look like one of Nadal's opponents, as if he was controlling Nadal's movements (which, of course, he was to a large extent). This wasn't meant to be happening, and how thrilling it was to witness it. But its occurrence brought to a halt Nadal's run at the French Open, which was even more extraordinary than Söderling's win, even more at odds with what was meant to be. Nadal's dominance on clay has been so other, and this otherness only increased as the dominance continued. Far from being a monotonous procession, far from being bland in its apparent predictability (and a fat lot of good predictions were here, as so very often), Nadal's Parisian tyranny was more compelling than nearly anything else sport can offer. The discombobulation caused by Söderling is all well and good, but history was being written before our eyes, and now the author is dead (or winded, more likely).



The worship of the god of the FA Cup upset may be based less in reality than in wishful thinking, but that is not to say that it is beneath consideration. It still exerts a powerful force. And here we hit upon another difference between Söderdämmerung and a Cup shock — perhaps even between tennis and football themselves. The Cup draws its power from football's version of the class system, and the potential for that system's subversion, or the illusion of the potential for the system's subversion. The system is formidable because it is so deeply entrenched. And it is so deeply entrenched because the clubs are historical entities. Players are sold, managers are sacked, directors sell their sakes and fans die off; but the club remains, in some way, the same as it was when it was founded. It has, for want of a better cliché, a soul, which retains the club's essence through the generations. There is a sense in which a club's status is determined not merely by their results on the pitch, but by privilege/lack thereof, and being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time. This sense, subtle though it may be, feeds into the delight taken at an upset.

Tennis, meanwhile, renews itself constantly. Players turn pro, players retire: the tour looks completely different now to how it did twenty years ago, and to how it will twenty years hence. So, there is no heritage, or baggage, directly attached to the players. Add to this the naked meritocracy of the sport, and the "upset=good thing" equation loses the crisp certainty it retains in the FA Cup. Seeing the mighty fall in tennis does not come automatically accompanied by a glass of Schadenfreudebräu. A player is the best because he is the best, because he has proved it time and again. He has not bought his talent from lesser entities, nor was blessed enough to be in the upper echelon of the sport just as said echelon decided to screw the rest of the game over. With this is mind, what is left is a sense of sadness when a great player leaves the stage, because (here's the selfishness again) we are most likely being deprived of seeing greatness in action.



In other words: YES I'M BLOODY WELL PISSED OFF THAT I — YES, I — AM NOT GETTING THE NADAL-FEDERER FINAL I'VE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO FOR MONTHS. Yep, I made you read 1250 words when I could have written all this in twenty-four. I mean, there was going to be a liveblog and everything! You'd have loved it! I think, by now, we know the custom for when our manifest destiny has been thwarted: send your death threats to Robin Söderling, c/o... Read more...

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