Federer insists he is still a force

There have been times, even in the recent past, when Roger Federer has made you wonder whether he might just go on for ever. Who could have imagined that he would play one of the matches of his life, just a month before his 34th birthday, to deny Andy Murray at Wimbledon last summer? Or that Novak Djokovic, having swept through 2015 in allconquering style, would lose to the Swiss at last season's year-ending Barclays ATP World Tour Finals?

In the first two months of this year, however, the 17-times Grand Slam champion confronted his own mortality, at least in terms of his tennis life. On the day after his loss to Djokovic in the semi-finals of the Australian Open Federer was running a bath for his twin daughters when he turned and felt something click in his left knee. Within a week he was back home in Switzerland having surgery on a torn meniscus.

“There was definitely a time of, say, 12 hours before and after the surgery and then going through the night and waking up in the morning when things were a bit fragile in my world,” Federer admits.

“I realised that you're like a passenger. You have to trust the people who are doing the surgery and are taking care of you, that it's the right thing, that you'll be OK again. It was hard for me, especially for about two hours or so. I was very emotional about it, going into the surgery. I was scared. Waking up from surgery, I was worried.” THE INDEPENDENT