Tennis final a smash hit with 13.1m viewers

THE Wimbledon men's final was watched by 13.1 million viewers at its peak, almost half of Britain's TV audience, it emerged yesterday.

But while pundits hailed Rafael Nadal's power play in the "best Wimbledon final ever", the young Spaniard still cannot compete – at least for viewers – with a fiery young man of yesteryear, John McEnroe.

In Sunday's final, the five-minute peak was recorded at 9:15pm, when Nadal finally beat five-times champion Roger Federer. It represented 47.6 per cent of the TV audience. The average audience throughout the final, the longest in Wimbledon history, was 8.6 million on BBC1.

However, the 1980 game between Bjorn Borg and McEnroe still has the all-time record audience, with 17.3 million viewers.

The BBC's sport director, Roger Mosey, said of the Nadal-Federer match: "This has been a truly extraordinary Wimbledon, one of the greatest men's finals ever, with millions on the edge of their seats. We're delighted so many people have been attracted to tennis across all the BBC services."

Nadal has been hailed the best player in the world by the Spanish media after his epic victory.

The front page of sports daily Marca declared yesterday: "It doesn't matter what the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) say, Rafa, you are the number one."

Daily newspaper El Pais said: "Federer has never come across such a mercurial player, who combines silky tennis with a personality of stone.

"Rafa Nadal is his name. Yesterday, he was champion of Wimbledon. Tomorrow, he is morally the world number one."

Several former champions have described the dramatic encounter as the greatest Wimbledon final yet. McEnroe himself said the game represented the pinnacle of tennis. He said simply: "This is the greatest match I've ever seen."

Boris Becker, another former Wimbledon champion, said: "It was the best final I've seen, and I'm including the Bjorn Borg versus John McEnroe classic back in 1980 and some of Pete Sampras's finals in that."

An epic, great even, but the greatest men's final ever?

Mike Gilson

WHAT is all this greatest game ever stuff? As the last flashbulb illuminated the beaming face of Nadal and the sunken features of Federer on Centre Court, experts and headline writers were rushing to pronounce.

All, from the illustrious, such as John McEnroe, to the unqualified – 2,000 Brits for something called OnePoll.Com – have voted Sunday's Wimbledon men's final the Greatest Ever.

The tennis equivalent of Ali's Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman is now the astonishing record-breaking four hours and 48 minutes that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal traded different kind of blows in the more gentile environs of SW19.

But the Greatest Ever tag should not be thrown around so lightly. Like good wine, we need to wait before pronouncing on a sporting event's worth.

First, we need layers of myth, half-remembered stats, flashbacks of searing images and mangled verbal accounts to pile up. Then, after a few years, we need to revisit the actuality to confirm that indeed it was that good. Hey, sometimes even better. Carlos Alberto's goal for Brazil against Italy in the 1970 World Cup final gets more poetic every time it is replayed.

So what of Sunday's epic (I think we can say that) between the muscled-up Spanish matador and the shape-shifting, languid Swiss five-times champion?

In the early 1940s, Russian linguist Vladimir Propp painstakingly discovered that there were only 31 thematic developments (love, loss, triumph, violation, redemption, etc) in all the folktales he studied, leading the great French thinkers to propose that what was true for narrative was indeed true of life.

Thus was born the impenetrable academic thesis that is Structuralism. In the almost five hours before 9:16pm on Sunday night, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer lived through all 31 Propp stages – about three times over.

It was sensational, it was breathtakingly theatrical and at the end it was too dark to play proper tennis. And boy, oh boy, did we need this distracting, riveting narrative in these credit-crunching, knife-wielding, climate-warming times.

And at the finish we saw in the gloom the end of an era of greatness. For Federer, the player of the most sublime, beautiful tennis the world has ever seen, had no answer to the sheer pumped-up athleticism of the younger man.

We glimpsed the past in that half-light, but we saw an awe-inspiring future of how humanity must push itself to the outer physical limits to achieve sporting greatness.

The narrative will continue. There is nothing worse than not being No1 anymore, a fate that now awaits Federer. Ask Bjorn Borg what it feels like.

Imperious Vogue editor Anna Wintour does not tend to adopt world No 2s or No 3s in the way she did Federer last year, taking him into her rarefied orbit and turning him into a fashion icon.

The world will move on. Young British boys will emulate Rafa the Pirate for the next two weeks, before switching back to footie.

So, 48 hours later, was it the greatest game ever? You wouldn't expect me to opine but, if absolutely necessary, I'd say any match in which a defending champion records 52 unforced errors could still be regarded as great – but not the greatest.

IN NUMBERS

288
minutes in final, rain delays excluded

25
aces by Federer

413
total points won by both players in final

5
double faults committed by each player

60
number of winners played by Rafael Nadal

129
fastest serve, in mph, by Federer