TENNIS/FRENCH OPEN:SOME FIRMLY held beliefs were shattered yesterday when the closest player to a deity in modern tennis was cruelly exposed at Roland Garros as all too humanly frail and mortal. In the most one-sided French Open final since 1977 when Guillermo Villas beat Brian Gottfried 6-0, 6-3, 6-0, a disbelieving world number one, Roger Federer, could take only four games from the imperious Rafael Nadal, who won his fourth successive title to equal the record run of Bjorn Borg from 1978 to 1981.
This is not the way great players lose Grand Slam finals. It was ugly and it was disfiguring and as much as the great Federer tried to rationalise it after the match, the magnitude of Nadal's win is likely to leave a mark.
"Today Rafa was supreme," he said. "To lose the way I did today is very hard. It's a rough loss. I tried and I hoped and it wasn't enough. When you really cannot play your game and he can play exactly what he wants from the baseline you end up with scores like this sometimes. I'll move on from here."
Fittingly Borg was in Paris under grey skies to present the trophy and witness the unlikely crushing of Federer, who went down 6-3, 6-1, 6-0, the worst defeat he has ever suffered in a Grand Slam match.
Whether Federer can leave this misadventure behind him on his quest towards another Wimbledon title and Peter Sampras's record of 14 Grand Slams is open to question as Nadal improves by the year on the slowed-down grass of London SW19. Federer's Grand Slam tally stands at 12, Roland Garros remaining the one he has never won.
For fans of Nadal, it was a towering illustration of his own ever-improving game, which over the last two weeks took him through the draw without dropping a set. The Spaniard had always been the best defensive player in the world with his ability to retrieve balls from close to the front seats of the stand. Now he may also be the best offensive player too and as much as Federer did not play to his own sublime level, Nadal magnificently surpassed his.
"I said it three years ago - he plays like (he has) two forehands from the baseline because he has an open stance on both sides. I can't do that," said Federer. "And maybe he's got the great advantage as well in his normal life that he's right-handed by nature and not a lefty. But his forehand is great. He hardly misses."
Such was Nadal's dominance from the beginning that Federer had only one game in 11 service games where he did not face break points, and in those 11 he lost serve eight times.
That one game, where he easily held serve for 3-3 in the second set, was also the last he won. He did have a break point on the Nadal serve in the next game to take a 4-3 lead but a flicked backhand just caught the net and his chance to turn the match perished as he went on to lose that set 6-3 and the third to love.
Every endeavour by him was successfully countered by the 22-year old, who took the match on one of the Swiss player's 35 unforced errors, on this occasion a long forehand over the baseline.
In a muted reaction to winning the match point, there was no rolling around from Nadal on the terre battue. In previous years he has collapsed on to the red clay but to clown around in celebration would have kept Federer standing at the net stewing in his own rarely witnessed inadequacies.
Out of respect Nadal simply pulled off his wide, green bandana, knowing he had successfully faced down every challenge over two weeks with ferocity and aplomb, threw his hands in the air and marched to the deflated number one as the undisputed king of clay.
"I didn't expect it (to be so onesided)," said Nadal. "I think I played well but Roger made more mistakes than usual. I thought the match would be much closer."
On comparisons with Borg, the Spaniard was typically humble.
"In 2008 I won the Roland Garros title. That's the most important thing to me. When I retire you can ask me about the record of Borg. It's always nice to be compared to Borg especially because he was much better than me."
