Morning:
8°c
Flitting across the horizon, barely visible but edging into view, is this unsettling question. Could it be Rafael Nadal, and not Roger Federer, who might yet prove to be the greatest tennis player who ever lived?
This may seem a foolish notion when the Fed has won 12 Grand Slam titles on three different surfaces to Nadal's four all on the red clay of Paris.
But it isn't entirely about the quantity of major titles - Jimmy Connors won eight Grand Slams to John McEnroe's seven, but no sane person would regard him as the superior player - and even if it were, Nadal, still only 22 and improving at frightening pace, has the time to overhaul Pete Sampras's record of 14 himself.
Comparative greatness is an intensely subjective judgment, needless to state, based on a complex amalgam of factors, but since one of them is the head-to-head record between rivals Sunday's final may offer a clue.
I say "Sunday's final" as though it were decided, when there is a minimal chance that Federer will lose today to Marat Safin, and an infinitesimal one that Rainer Schuettler will beat Nadal.
But defeat for either would be a seismic shock off the sporting Richter scale. What the world wants is another rematch, and barring injury or miracle, this is what the world will get.
And on all recent evidence, there is only one winner. For perplexing reasons, newspapers have taken to referring to Nadal as "the matador", but this is arrant cobblers.
He is, as this column often observes, a rampaging Majorcan bull who charges, tramples and gores the opposition without pause or mercy.
Federer is the matador, deploying all his wit and subtlety in the hope of evading the horns long enough to unleash rapier counter-thrusts of his own.
A year ago he managed it by the skin of his teeth, despite being outplayed, but since then Nadal's movement, power and accuracy have improved immeasurably while Federer has regressed. Do not be fooled by the ease with which the Swiss has floated unscathed through the draw.
He did exactly the same in Paris before being humiliated by Nadal in the French Open Final and it will be astonishing if he doesn't exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic shock when he meets Nadal for the first time since the devastation of winning only four games.
Admittedly this is grass, not clay, but Centre Court plays so slowly now, and the bounce is so true, that the chasm between the surfaces has shrunk.
While Federer still talks a bold game about relishing the challenge of Nadal, his body language betrays him.
Palpably he finds the extreme difficulty of ending points against Nadal depressing, and his failure to master the wicked top spin Nadal imparts demeaning.
So fearful of the Spaniard's relentlessness has he become that when he leads Nadal in a set these days, almost invariably he goes to pieces. Spooked by the brutal force of his younger rival, he has no confidence that he can handle him even on his own favourite surface.
I hope that I'm made to look an imbecile by a prediction once again, because what happened in Paris a month ago was gruesome to behold.
If so, and if the Fed wins a sixth title on Sunday, it will unquestionably be his finest hour.
But I simply cannot imagine how Federer will evade another savage goring from a cyclonic force of nature who could challenge every previous assumption about the identity of tennis's greatest-ever player.
Hair is restored, Pakistan draw, and it never really happened at all
The latest series of Doctor Who ends tomorrow, and logic suggests that the old device of parallel universes will figure the denouement.
For anyone finding the wait hard to bear, I suggest a brief glance at the ICC's masterstroke regarding the 2006 Oval Test against Pakistan. For here we find the theory of parallel universes transplanted from science fiction.
In this world, England won the game when the Pakistanis were defaulted for refusing to play in umbrage at the accusation of ball tampering from Darrell Hair, who was then sacked as a Test umpire.
Over in ICC World, however, the match is now officially recorded as a draw, while a regenerated Hair is back on their Test-match panel. The entire incident, in other words, never happened.
There are other explanations, the most obvious being that the ICC is so in thrall to the subcontinental nations bankrolling the sport that there is nothing it will not countenance in the quest to suck up to them.
But that would imply a most nauseating capitulation to the power of money, and we can't believe that. So I prefer the parallel universe theory.
How we slipped into ICC World I'm not sure, but if it was a tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum (and it generally is), all we need is another one of those and the ICC will record the last Ashes series in Australia as a 5-0 win for England.
Choking Tim's lost for words
By Sunday afternoon Tim Henman will, God willing, have been restored to full health and the Wimbledon commentary box.
Whenever the poor lamb has managed to get a word in (and in John McEnroe's company that isn't easy), his diction has suggested the lovechild of Falklands War MoD spokesman Ian McDonald, Michael Fish after a failed suicide attempt with a tranquilliser dart, Sooty's sidekick Sweep after an Estuary English correspondence course, and his namesake Nice-But-Dim.
I know that comes to four sires, but success has many fathers.
Tim must have talked for an aggregated eight minutes, which may well be seven minutes longer than his insights have demanded, but that has still proved enough for him to lose his voice.
That's the BBC version, at least, but you can't help wondering whether, what with all the pollen in the air, he finds himself a martyr to choking once again.
A summer of sporting disasters
Even by our own impeccable standards of sustained sporting failure, this has been an usually catastrophic summer.
The rugby union tour to New Zealand was a disaster on the pitch and a disgrace off it, the one-day cricketers festooned themselves with shame against the same opposition.
Nothing so became our footballers due to their absence from Euro 2008, the Olympic medal haul promises to make the scrap-strewn Steptoe back yard look like Aladdin's cave, Lee Westwood blew it on the closing holes of the US Open, and of our tennis players no further intrusion into private grief is required.
No pressure on Lewis Hamilton then, but if he fails to bring down the chequered flag on a sensationally checkered sporting summer at Silverstone on Sunday, the last hope of glory will rest with disgraced sprinter Dwain Chambers's legal attempt to take himself to Beijing.
