On my conversion to the religion of Roger Federer

I’ve been a tennis fan for years, and take every opportunity to see live matches. Until this week, however, I’d never had the opportunity to see Roger Federer play live.

Federer, obviously, needs no introduction. He is, we are told, the greatest player of all time, a living legend blessed with supernatural grace, speed, and precision. He’s contributed a huge amount to the sport, through his rivalry with Rafael Nadal, and his affability and modesty. Everyone loves him.

The thing is, though, I’ve never been much of a Federer fan. His subtlety and serenity were always a bit lost on me. When deciding who to support, I tend towards extroversion and drama in both play and personality, and I prefer to watch a hard-fought, grinding match than a flawless but one-sided display of the kind Federer so often produces. My love for Nadal, for example, was cemented during his five-set marathon against Robert Kendrick at Wimbledon 2006, a thriller of a match during which Nadal battled against the odds to win from two sets down for only the second time in his career.

So when I found out that I would be lucky enough see a Nadal-Federer match this week, I knew who I would be supporting. All weekend, I bored my friends and colleagues with my over-excited nonsense. I cheered and squealed as Nadal came on court. The stage was set for what I was sure would be a classic match, close and dramatic, with Nadal, of course, as the eventual victor.

A classic it was not; Nadal never had a chance. But far from being disappointed, I experienced a revelation, one which everyone else had years ago: Roger Federer is a tennis player of devastating genius. Within two games, all my fervor for Nadal had evaporated. I hardly noticed him during the hour the match lasted; he was reduced to little more than the wall against which Federer could practice his breathtaking single-handed backhand. Federer covered the whole court without ever seeming to move, he hit astonishing angles with even more astonishing frequency, and all the while his hair swished gracefully as though he was in a L’Oreal advert. It was as though I finally fully understood all the praise directed at Federer; I have never seen tennis so captivating or beautiful. As Nadal graciously admitted after the match, only Federer can play like that.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit late to the party. But like his career so far, Federer’s autumn years will surely be incomparable to anyone else’s.

It’s not the taking part, it’s the winning that counts

As a country, Britain lurches between overconfidence and arrogance based on a long-dead empire, and a stereotypical sort of self-effacing, prim and proper diffidence. We bumptiously expect a level of international prominence which is no longer truly justified by our economic position, yet we cringe at the ever-intensifying Hollywood showiness of The X Factor.

When it comes to sport, we usually fall into the latter category. England last won the football world cup nearly 50 years ago; there hasn’t been a British men’s winner of Wimbledon for more than 75. So if we obviously can’t win anything, the resigned thinking goes, we should focus  on the taking part. At least we still host the world’s best tennis tournament. Thank goodness the English Premier League is still the best in the world, even if most of the top players are foreign-born. And even though everyone seems to have already accepted that London 2012 won’t be as good as Beijing 2008, at least we’ll have the Olympic legacy to fall back on. Although even that it is doubt: the latest figures from Sport England show that weekly participation among the public, a key aspect of the London 2012 bid, has actually dropped in many sports in the last three years. But never mind, eh? At least we had a go.

Give me a break. Football may be the only sport many Brits care about, except for tennis once a year, and rugby every now and again, but our lack of World Cup success is hardly a comprehensive barometer of our sporting ability. For such a small country, we actually have a breadth of talent in a huge variety of sports. In tennis, Andy Murray is closing in on Roger Federer to take the world number 3 spot, the boys team have just won the Junior Davis Cup, and three out of four semi-finalists in the junior boys at the US Open were British. In athletics, we have Jessica Ennis, Phillips Idowu, and the incomparable Mo Farah. At the Berlin marathon last month, Paula Radcliffe began her comeback after a complicated injury, and was disappointed with third place. We have so many world class cyclists and rowers that we don’t know what to do with them. And as I discovered last week at the GB World Cup, we are thriving at judo: -66kg gold medal winner and U-23 European champion Ashley McKenzie is surely a star in the making, yet the sport suffers from such a lack of coverage that it doesn’t even have a page on the BBC sport website.

Surely a better Olympic legacy would be to celebrate our talent and champions across the board, rather than romanticizing the 1966 World Cup, or fretting about mini tennis participation. Sport is one area where we can afford to be confident.

My two cents’ worth on Formula 1

I have lately been uncharacteristically quiet, but I have been awakened from my slumber by, as usual, someone saying something extremely annoying. Or, in this case, two people.

First, it has emerged that the BBC and Sky Sports are to share the broadcast rights for Formula 1. It appears that Sky have outbid the BBC, meaning that starting next year, only half the Grands Prix will be broadcast live free to air. This is a real shame, because the BBC coverage over the past few years has been consistently excellent, and because F1 fans are the only real losers in the deal. But what has really irked me is a quote from Adam Parr, chairman of the Williams team, whose obliviousness to the importance of fans to his sport is mind-boggling;

“People have to bear in mind what it costs to put on this show. It is part of the character of F1.

For us to design and build the two cars that we will have on the grid on Sunday here, without putting an engine in them, without putting a driver in them, without accounting for the 70 staff that we bring to each race – without all of that those cars cost £2m. You multiply that by all the cars on the grid and that is £24m minimum of the costs just to make the parts. That is part of the show.

It is not a bloke or two blokes with a tennis racket and a pair of plimsolls with zero cost. It is a very, very expensive sport. The best thing we can do for fans, whether they want to come to the races or want to watch it on TV, is to reduce the cost of the sport without spoiling the show.”

By suggesting that Formula 1 is providing a service which fans are presumptuously expecting for free, Parr avoids the key difference between Formula 1 and “two blokes with a tennis racket”. Without motorsport fans to validate it as a sport, F1 is essentially an extended exercise in advertising. The payback it gets for the enormous is expense comes in increased sales, exposure and brand cachet for the constructors involved. To insist that it’s only fair that fans pay to see the show is to impose a fee on those who are being advertised to.

Having already spend the day in a state of raging indignation, I was not happy to see the London Evening Standard’s take on the story. The news is apparently only a disappointment for half of the population; the other half, the “Grand Prix widows”, can “hope to get at least some of the Sundays back”. Well, hurrah for casual sexism! It seems demonstrably untrue to me that women only watch Formula 1, or any sport, for that matter, because the boys make them. The Red Bull Racing hat I’m wearing right now demonstrates it quite well, in fact.

Well, I declare now, in front of my 25 readers, that I just won’t stand for this sort of thing.

Why I love tennis (an ode to Rafael Nadal)

So tomorrow (or is today by now? I can’t figure out the time difference) is the Australian Open final, and I could not be more excited! I doubt anyone will believe me if I say I predicted a Murray-Djokovic final, but I did. Honest. This is only the second time since 2005 that a Grand Slam final has not featured Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer. To talk about a changing of the guard is more than a bit premature (Nadal’s only 24!), but it’s certainly an intriguing change. Although I swear I predicted the finalists, the match is too close to call. Novak has one grand slam to Andy’s zero (yes, I’m on first name terms!), but Andy has won the last three times they’ve met. Anything could happen! Anyway, as promised, I will use this opportunity to thrill/rant at/bore you with reasons why I love tennis.

When I start to go on about tennis (which is quite a frequent occurence), people often tell me they find it boring watching a ball being hit backwards and forwards across a net. No more boring than watching a football being dribbled backwards and forwards across a pitch, I reply. Indeed, much less boring, because in football, the ball rarely approaches the goal; in tennis, every shot increases the anticipation and excitement. This is what I love the most: to watch two of the world’s best tennis players pitted against each other is two watch a psychological battle. Each player is equally well-prepared; each has his arsenal of shots; each is trying to take down the other: the result of a tennis match often comes down to which player has the greatest desire to win. A long rally is not boring; the longer it goes on, the more pressure on each player, and the more important the rally becomes to the match.

People also complain about the complexity of tennis. This, I reply, is precisely what makes it so exciting. As the players move through the match, every point, game and set becomes more and more vital, and therefore more and more enthralling for the spectator. Imagine a long rally at 30-40. Early in the match, it doesn’t mean much which way the point goes. Each player still has time to claw back points. But if our rally is taking place at 3-4 in the final set, every shot counts: if the server wins the point, he levels the game to deuce and stands a pretty good chance of holding serve; if not, his opponent breaks his serve, and the match begins to slip away from him. At any point, the match can go either way. Anything can happen, because every shot has the potential to be a winner which totally changes the course of the match.

And even if you didn’t understand all that, how can you not love watching a sport played by this guy?