‘All Greek to me’ as Fed flummoxed
Roger Federer was briefly refused entry to the player’s area, after a stickler of a security guard spotted that the winner of 20 grand slam singles titles was not wearing his accreditation badge. A day later, the great man suffered further indignity, as he found himself summarily ejected from the tournament.
The culprit this time was Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas, 20, who produced a masterpiece of classical tennis to curtail Federer’s sequence of 17 straight victories at the Australian Open.
‘‘I am the happiest man on Earth right now, I cannot describe it,’’ an emotional Tsitsipas told John McEnroe in his on-court interview, while clutching his shoulder-length mane in disbelief.
The result was a blow for Federer’s legions of international fans.
But if we are thinking of the future, it is no bad thing that the man to oust him should have been Tsitsipas, a graceful performer whose instinctive volleys and one-handed backhand can only be described as Federeresque.
These two players have never faced each other before in a competitive match but it still felt like the master being surpassed by the apprentice.
Even Federer, 37, said afterwards that he could see a little of himself in his conqueror. ‘‘I guess so. He has a one-handed backhand and I used to have long hair, too. He has a continental grip [and] that’s more my way, let’s say, than Rafa’s [Nadal] way.’’
Physically, Tsitsipas is both explosive and elastic – a combination which soaks up the impact of these rock-hard courts – while his mental game was aweinspiring.
Federer applied huge pressure throughout, but Tsitsipas simply refused to crack, saving all 12 break points that he faced.
Even when British chair umpire James Keothavong hit him with a pair of time violations in the very first game, the second of which cost him a first serve, he managed not to unleash the stream of Greek obscenities which had sullied his third-round victory over Nikoloz Basilashvili.
Meanwhile, Federer’s forehand – the peerless scalpel that has carved out the bulk of his 99 career titles – was losing its edge.
‘‘I have massive regrets,’’ Federer said after his 6-7, 7-6, 7-5, 7-6 defeat. ‘‘I felt like I have to win the second set [and that] cost me the game tonight.
‘‘I also didn’t break him at the Hopman Cup [in a recent exhibition match that Federer
won in two tie-break sets]. So clearly something is wrong how I return him.’’
This was a contest between the youngest man left in the tournament and the oldest, their birthdays separated by 17 years. After the match, McEnroe spoke to Tsitsipas about the ‘‘changing of the guard’’. But when this was put to Federer, he sounded slightly peeved.
‘‘Yeah, sure,’’ Federer scoffed. ‘‘He’s in front of the mic a lot. He’s always going to say stuff. I love John. I’ve heard that story the last 10 years. From that standpoint, nothing new there.’’
For many, Tsitsipas’s performance brought back memories of Federer’s own moment of self-revelation. In the summer of 2001 he dethroned Pete Sampras on the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
We went from Pete the Serve to Roger the Great, and who is to say that the next monarch of the game might not be Stefanos the Deep?
Tsitsipas is a loner, a Greek philosopher who admits that he has few friends in the locker room, but whose favourite activities involve photography and video production.
‘‘It’s better going outside and creating something rather than just sitting inside playing video games,’’ he told one recent interviewer. ‘‘There’s a lot of things out there to discover.’’
To return to that parallel with 2001, Federer needed a while longer to adapt to expectations, eventually opening his grand-slam account at Wimbledon two years later.
And one suspects that Tsitsipas, for all his obvious talent, might not be ready to take this title.
Admittedly, he will probably have more power left in his legs than his quarter-final opponent Roberto Bautista Agut, whose five-set victory over Marin Cilic, 6-7 6-3 6-2 4-6 6-4 was his third such lung-buster in the space of four matches.
But he could potentially wind up having to beat Nadal – who cruised through yesterday in just 125 minutes
6-0 6-1 7-6 over Czech Tomas Berydch– and Novak Djokovic in successive matches. To take out one member of the ‘‘Big Three’’ is extraordinary in itself; to complete the set would be all but impossible.
Tsitsipas and Bautista Agut both earned their first appearance in the quarterfinals of a slam, and so did American Frances Tiafoe, who overcame Grigor Dimitrov 7-5 7-6 6-7 7-5 with a quite stunning performance on his 21st birthday.
The stats reveal that this is now Federer’s longest run without a grandslam semifinal since he was 21.
Questions will inevitably circulate about his future, but he confirmed yesterday that he plans to play the French Open for the first time since
2015.
■ Meanwhile Rafael Nadal says leading female players deserve to win more prizemoney than their male counterparts, provided they draw greater ticket sales than the men.
Having breezed through to his 11th Australian Open quarter-final Nadal was asked about comments from Serena Williams who is pushing for equal pay for men and women at all tournaments. Men and women already earn equal prizemoney at the four grand slams.
Nadal was reluctant to buy into issues of gender, but suggested that he would have no problem if women were to earn more than men.
"I don’t know why you are trying all the time to create these kind of stories on this thing. As you know, I love women’s tennis," Nadal said.