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    Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

    You don't see it very often that a line judge gets three calls overturned on review on championship point.

    In their post-match speeches, Federer and Nadal provided a light of decency and generosity of spirit at a time when these qualities find it so difficult to shine through the fall-out of a world going to shit.

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      Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

      The final point was not overturned, it was called in before Nadal challenged it. Hawkeye proved the Spaniard to be wrong.

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        Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

        Federer's achievement of at least 5 wins in three different slams (7-5-5-1) is worthy of note. Nadal by contrast is 9-2-2-1; Novak is 6-3-2-1. I think it makes the GOAT beyond dispute.

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          Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

          multipleman78 wrote: He has now won 2 in a row v Nadal for the first time since 2007.
          One of those two was the 2007 Wimbledon Final. And that was also the previous time that Federer had beaten Nadal over five sets. Nadal had won six-in-a-row in the match-up since then, including at least one on all three surfaces.

          That sort of stat will always remain a problem with any claim that Federer is indisputably the GOAT. It's hard to be so definitive about calling a player that when a rival exists who is so clearly superior when it matters most. Nearly a decade without beating your major rival in the key tournaments, and you are the Greatest Of All Time? Problematic.

          The injury time-outs in the Semi and Final, and Federer's comment after the Semi that he was carrying a leg injury most of the tournament, probably mean he will now be out for weeks, if not months. I can't really see Indian Wells and Miami appearing that attractive to him. He may only re-appear just in time for the French. Or maybe not at all... Pete Sampras was the #17 seed in the 2002 US Open, coincidentally enough.

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            Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

            He may as well just play the slams - no chance of ever being #1 again, and he's shown he can win with a #17 seeding.

            re. Nadal: I still think that 9 out of his 14 slams being the French counts against him having sustained an all-court dominance for long enough to be GOAT. I also wonder if Federer would have lost those matches had he had the better tactics he has used this week.

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              Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

              Does there need to be a definitive GOAT?

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                Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                Jimski wrote: Does there need to be a definitive GOAT?
                Good question. I would guess not. It's been a privilege to watch the current big four this last decade, as it was with Borg, McEnroe and Connors when I were a lad.

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                  Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                  Does there need to be a definitive GOAT?
                  Very good question. I strongly believe that any such choice would be irredeemably dubious, whatever the fanatical supporters of any given player might say.

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                    Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                    Wonderful encounter. I wouldn't rank it as high as the Wimbledon Finals of 2007 & 2008 or the Australian Open of 2009, perhaps their fourth greatest match behind those. I didn't expect an epic like those above, with both players ageing, so the long rallies were less likely than before, and in Federer's case, he's altered his game over the years to attempt winning shots early in the rally in order to avoid the sort of endurance battles in which he could never emerge victorious against Nadal. The first two sets were, relative to what these guys usually produce, quite average. The next two were damn good and captivating too. That last set though - a true classic. Watching that final game, Federer serving for the Championship, Nadal gets to 0-15 with a sensational cross-court forehand, then Federer double-faults for 0-30, and I'm sitting there thinking that where these two are concerned, the unbelievable is believable. Of course it had to have another twist like that.

                    I was exchanging text messages with a number of friends and family, all watching the match, and every one of us believed that Federer just had to win the third set, because whilst Nadal could still win from 2-1 down, there was no belief that Federer could win from 2-1. Similarly, at 2-2, it had to be Nadal from there, and at a break up in the fifth, there was only one winner. That said, I didn't think Federer was necessarily gone at 1-3 in the fifth. Nadal is the king of the five-setter, but in the semi, Dimitrov got to 30 on all of Nadal's service games in that deciding set, and here Federer was getting break points on Nadal's first three service games. So Federer surely felt he was still in with a good chance.

                    Both players have rightly received plaudits for their post-match comments, and how complimentary they were to the other. They always were respectful to one another, but today was almost gushing. I think both felt this final appearance was very much a bonus, so defeat wasn't going to really bother either.

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                      Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                      Regarding the Greatest debate, I'm reminded of a discussion I had here with Seven Saxon Kings, I believe, in the wake of Nadal's victory over Federer at Roland Garros in 2011. Whilst believing Federer to be the Greatest, I acknowledged that if the final tally of Grand Slams is, say, 17-15 in Federer's favour, then there would be a case for saying that Nadal's 15 is the greater achievement, given how most of those were won when the opposition was stronger (ie with Djokovic & Murray on the scene), whereas a substantial amount of Federer's 17 would have been won when the opposition was not as strong (that 2004-06 period). So reducing it to that simple number's game doesn't tell the full story. Also, as Janik mentions above, Nadal having Federer's number for the best part of a decade, has to be a factor. For that, whilst I don't agree, I've no issue with those who regard Nadal as the greater of the two.

                      But Federer's stats, aside from the number of actual Grand Slam victories, are stunning. Five victories in three of the four majors; reaching 28 Finals, and at least one in 13 out of 15 years; 41 Semi-Finals, and at least one every year over 15 years; reaching at least the Quarter-Final stage in every Slam event for a ten year period. It's astonishing stuff, how he's stayed at the top of the sport throughout. 2013 was probably his worst year, yet he still made the Australian semi. And what he's managed to do since that slump, when sensible logic would regard him as finished, reaching three finals in two years in which he lost to Djokovic who, at the time, was playing as good tennis as Federer did at his peak, and now becoming the oldest winner of a Slam in over forty years. So for me, he's the Greatest, but not purely because of the highest number of Slams won, but because of how he's stayed at the top of the sport for so long.

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                        Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                        Evariste Euler Gauss wrote:
                        Does there need to be a definitive GOAT?
                        Very good question. I strongly believe that any such choice would be irredeemably dubious, whatever the fanatical supporters of any given player might say.
                        There doesn't need to be, no. And EEG is right that in almost any sporting situation it's highly unlikely that there will be. The margins between the top players are too fine, and the comparisons too imprecise.
                        Federer has won the most Slams, but he lost nearly two matches for every one his has won in his career, and exactly two for every Slam Final he has won to his greatest rival, Nadal. Nadal, however, has won fewer Slams, and the vast majority of them at one particular tournament with a very particular difference*. He has only won 3 hard court Slams, probably the most neutral surface, in 24 attempts.
                        As of the next few months Serena is between Court and Graf for Slams, but in very different eras in both cases. And her strike rate is notably lower than either (Court at 51%, Graf 41% and Serena 35%). Pure longevity is building up the numbers, but does longevity aid or hinder a player in that claim, if it means they have operated at a slower rate but done so for longer? And none of these three had a career overlapping almost entirely with another potential claimant as is the case for Navratilova and Evert. If either of those had been born ten years earlier, they might have won 30 titles, and Serena and Graf might have barely struggled into double figures (struggled being a relative term here). Or vice versa, with Serena/Graf dominating over Navratilova/Evert. We will never known.

                        So to be an undisputed GOAT, you need to be miles ahead of the pack. Something like Don Bradman, with a batting average 4 standard deviations higher than the next best. Or Esther Vergeer, who never lost a Paralympic or Grand Slam Wheelchair Singles match and had a 470 match unbeaten run on her retirement (she faced just one match point in that period). Or Heather McKay, who lost two Squash matches in her entire career, didn't drop a game in her 16 British Open finals and only two in earlier rounds (she won one of the finals 9-0 9-0 9-0).

                        * - there is little argument that Nadal now surpasses Borg and Villas as the GOAT of clay court Tennis. That is another of the handful of so-far-ahead-of-the-rest to be inarguable examples.

                        I guess it comes down to the same thing as greatest album/single of all times lists; some people love to rank things. Even when it's pretty subjective.

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                          Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                          Very well argued, OA. I'd agree with everything you've said there – and also with Janik's summation in the post immediately above. Today's (well, yesterday's game now) was a surprising delight, firstly for even happening, secondly for the way it played out, and thirdly and all the more so for that result.

                          I too believe it's impossible to declare a definitive Greatest Of All Time, as the parameters within which players and eras are measured are both partially subjective and endlessly evolving. Give Rod Laver today's professional career options, advances in racquet technology, diet, medicine, and strength and fitness training, the changes to courts, two or three rivals to battle each other to stupendous heights, etc. etc., and who's to say what tennis he'd be capable of? It's functionally a different sport from his day, more or less – just as his was compared with Fred Perry's era. And today's game also is, just to a lesser extent, from Bjorn Borg's day. And it also is, to a lesser extent, even from Pete Sampras' day. And so on.

                          Whatever anyone argues about the merits of the great champions of past and present when stacked against each other, though, I don't think there's one of them I'd rather watch than Roger Federer in full flow. He remains simply a joy to watch play tennis: there's finesse, power and grace all there at once, in a way none of his rivals can match. To still be doing it at the level he is, winning an 18th Slam at an age where almost all rivals of any era had long declined and quit the sport (Borg by 35 1/2 had been retired for virtually a decade!) is something else again.

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                            Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                            Lies, damn lies and statistics news:-
                            People will suggest that Federer had an easy path to the title, due to the early defeats of Murray and Djokovic. Whilst it's true that he beat neither of those, he is also the first man in 35 years to beat four top ten seeds en route to a Slam singles crown; #10 Berdych (R3), #5 Nishikori (R4), #4 Wawrinka (SF) and #9 Nadal (F). The previous player to do that was Mats Wilander in the 1982 French (#2 Lendl (R4), #5 Gerulaitis (QF), #4 Clerc (SF) and #3 Vilas (F)).
                            Some might suggest in response that this is pure luck-of-the-draw, because for most Slam Champions it just isn't available to do - if you yourself are a top 8 seed, the only way this is even potentially possibly is if your R4 opponent is either no.9 or no.10. And then you need your QF, SF and Final opponents to come through as scheduled or roughly so. The riposte to this is that this is the entire point. Federer's draw was not favourable by historic comparison, despite the earlier eliminations of two notables. It was, in fact, unusually tough. Most other slam champs have had more straightforward paths presented to them.

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                              Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                              Various Artist wrote: Give Rod Laver today's professional career options, advances in racquet technology, diet, medicine, and strength and fitness training, the changes to courts, two or three rivals to battle each other to stupendous heights, etc. etc., and who's to say what tennis he'd be capable of
                              Pat Cash was noting on Eurosport that Laver won 11 Slams and was ineligible for probably his peak years due to the Sport not yet being Open. But that as soon as it was, he did his second calendar year Grand Slam. However there is a risk here with having it both ways; Laver was clearly the best player on the planet in 1966-68 and would have won Slams then if he hadn't been in the Pros. However, he almost certainly wasn't in 1962, when he did his first calendar year Slam. He wasn't yet better than Ken Rosewall. That took until '65-'66 to fully change over (Laver was beating Rosewall regularly by '64, but Rosewall's wins in '64-'65, though infrequent, were notably coming in the big matches like Pro Slam Finals). Or maybe what it took rather than a date was ~3 years of exposure to Rosewall's game. Which would have started far earlier than 1963 but for the amateur/pro split.

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                                Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                This is what I was getting at too by "today's professional career options" – it's the great 'what if', isn't it, Laver's enforced absence from Slams in the mid-'60s due to turning pro. Of course, maybe he'd have burned himself out earlier if things had been different, or had a freak career-ending injury in a Slam final in '67, say, or...

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                                  Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                  If either of those had been born ten years earlier, they might have won 30 titles, and Serena and Graf might have barely struggled into double figures (struggled being a relative term here). Or vice versa, with Serena/Graf dominating over Navratilova/Evert. We will never known.
                                  Well, yes, but there's a much "closer to home" point in relation to Graf, namely Seles and the stabbing. There seems to be almost a conspiracy of silence around that, as if it would be too painful and unfair to Graf (who couldn't help what happened of course) to mention it, but the point is absolutely overwhelming when you look at the stats.

                                  Seles had won 7 of the 9 slams immediately prior to her stabbing (and that from playing in only 8 of those 9). She had established a clear dominance over Graf, most obviously in that statistic, but also in their H2H results. Graf had accumulated just 11 titles prior to the stabbing, and I very much doubt she would have added many more if Monica had not suffered it. We'll never know, but it's quite possible that Seles would have gone on to become the GOAT on the women's side. She has the record for most slams won as a teenager.

                                  I reckon the three greatest women would be Serena, Evert and Navratilova, with Serena on top partly for the number and partly for the fact that she's played in a more competitive era.

                                  Margaret Court's 24 is an annoying irrelevance. Look at the fields of players in her 1960s Aussie wins!

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                                    Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                    I don't think "What ifs" can serve as a relevant disqualifier. Graf beat whom she had to beat, from a pretty formidable field of competitors. Had she retired before the arrival of Seles, she'd still have been lauded as one of the greats, if alone for achieving the near impossible of winning all four Grand Slams in a calendar year.

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                                      Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                      Serena has her own Seles in Justine Henin, even if the reasons why it didn't last of all of both players careers are somewhat different. From 2004 to Henin's sudden retirement (as the then World No.1) in 2008, she won 5 Slams and reached a further 2 finals to Serena's 2 plus 1. Serena's 2+1 correspond exactly to the three Slams Henin missed with injury in that time (completeness should note that Serena was also absent, often but not always, in the 5+2 of Henin). Serena didn't get beyond the QFs in a Slam when the Belgian was present in that period, partly because that was where they tended to meet!
                                      Henin eclipsed Serena for half-a-decade, but then exited stage left, Borg-like, cutting the rivalry short by ~5 years and denying Serena her chance to fight back. Intriguingly, Henin's first Slam title in 2003 was immediately proceeded by the first Serena-slam. They then swapped titles in 2003 before Henin took over. When Serena first gathered all the Slam crowns to herself there was talk that she was going to dominate Tennis for a decade. Which, as it turned out, was true but just with an unforeseen five year delay whilst someone else was the best.

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                                        Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                        Henin arguably had the best technique of any female player that has perhaps ever played the game. OTOH Serena's power makes her unbeatable when she's hitting the ball cleanly and accurately.

                                        Henin seemed badly affected by the Wimbledon loss to Bartoli in 2007, having done the hard part by beating an injured Serena. Although she still won the US Open that year and was clear No. 1, she seemed to become convinced that she couldn't win Wimbledon, and without that crown there would always be an asterisk against her career relative to Serena.

                                        You could also argue that both Serena and Henin experienced "burn out" at various times. Serena was able to recover but Henin could not.

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                                          Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                          Had it not been for the stabbing, I wonder if the Graf-Seles rivalry would've been most closely analogous to the Federer-Nadal one. Seles' two-fisted backhand (indeed, either wing if I recall) attack is the game-changing equivalent of Nadal's massive-racqueted, absurdly-topspun ripped forehands, both battering their way to the very top of the sport with all-grunting power assaults that even two truly great multi-time champions in Graf and Federer had no immediate (or even medium-term) answer to. There's perhaps a question of whether Seles would've burned out after a few years, in the same sort of way as Nadal's body has paid for his style of play in recent years, and if Graf could've ultimately outmaneouvred her gameplan in the manner Federer did yesterday against Nadal.

                                          That does raise the spectre, of course, that it's taken Federer until he's 35 and Nadal 30, whilst Graf I think retired at 30 through injuries of her own, which seemed par for the course in those days. When you look at the ages of the finalists and semi-finalists in this Australian Open, you'd simply never have imagined it happening ten or fifteen years back.

                                          One curio I noticed during the coverage of Mirjana Lucic's incredible return to the semi-final of a major after 18 years was that her previous one was against Graf at Wimbledon '99, which would make that match Graf's last ever win in a Slam match as she lost that final to Davenport(?) and I'm sure it was her final Slam event before she retired. She'd just won her record 22nd at the French, which has now finally been broken by Serena winning her 23rd in Australia... just after beating Lucic-Baroni who was playing in her second ever semi-final. Mirjana's seventeen-and-a-half year wait in between her two Slam semis exactly spanned the entire era during which 22 majors was the record to beat.

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                                            Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                            One curio I noticed during the coverage of Mirjana Lucic's incredible return to the semi-final of a major after 18 years was that her previous one was against Graf at Wimbledon '99, which would make that match Graf's last ever win in a Slam match as she lost that final to Davenport(?) and I'm sure it was her final Slam event before she retired. She'd just won her record 22nd at the French, which has now finally been broken by Serena winning her 23rd in Australia... just after beating Lucic-Baroni who was playing in her second ever semi-final. Mirjana's seventeen-and-a-half year wait in between her two Slam semis exactly spanned the entire era during which 22 majors was the record to beat.
                                            That's wonderful.

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                                              Aussie, Aussie Aussie.

                                              Players presumably last longer if they win a lot of free points on the serve (Federer, Sampras, Serena, Venus) or indeed on the return (Connors, Agassi). Someone whose whole game is attritional is going to last less long, you would think.

                                              Graf and Seles IIRC started out very young; maybe they were the peak of that trend of very young European females on the circuit? Jankovic and Ivanovic definitely played too much tennis as teenagers.

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