Morning:
6°c
After a feverish Monday night when for stretches he seemed poised to have the worst experience involving a roof since the Cossacks pogromed Topol's village, here was a recuperative afternoon stroll for Andy Murray.
He swished away Juan Carlos Ferrero like a cow's tail dealing with a bluebottle.
This was the perfect quarter-final. Short, sharp and very sweet. Far from taking anything out of him it appeared to put plenty back in.
Murray looked tired at the start, when his listlessness communicated itself to a subdued crowd, but departed Centre Court looking as fresh as a Eurotrash wife leaving an Alpine clinic with her buttocks pumped full of monkey foetus.
This was not, having said that, quite as relaxing a watch as the scoreline suggests, because for the first set and a bit Murray was off his game.
The return of the big serve that went AWOL against Stanislas Wawrinka couldn't disguise the sluggishness of his movement and unwonted lapses of concentration.
Still, a chap who'd so recently endured a draining marathon is allowed a little time to shake off the residual fatigue.
It took him a while. When he dropped early in the second set, the mind flashed back to Paris when, having levelled his quarter-final with Fernando Gonzales, he relaxed, dropped serve, and was never in the match again.
This time it acted as a wake-up call. In the middle of the set he suddenly shook off the languor and became (apologies for this one) a Ferrero Rusher. With zose pulverizing serves and Exocet ground strokes he was reeeelly spoiling us, as his guile and power harried Ferrero to perdition.
A startling run of points transformed what had threatened to be a tricky and lengthy match into confidence-building practice session, with gratifyingly minimal reserves of energy spent.
The same cannot be said for his semi-final opponent. It took Andy Roddick (right) four hours and five arduous sets to see off an heroic Lleyton Hewitt in the match of the tournament so far.
He'll be feeling the after effects on Friday, when Murray should unravel Roddick's mighty but predictable game, as he did here three years ago. It will take a heartbreaking loss of nerve or injury to keep the Scot from the final now.
The bad news, for those too parochial to anticipate his record-breaking 15th major title with glee, is that Roger Federer was frighteningly majestic in dismantling the giant ace machine Ivo Karlovic. Unquestionably he is restored to his graceful, peerless best.
He now meets the German pretty boy Tommy Haas, who is in the form of his long career on grass.
He beat Novak Djokovic in the final of the Halle warm-up tournament in the Fatherland, and the plucky veteran impressively saw off the Serb again yesterday in four sets. An erstwhile world No2 who might have won grand slam titles but for a serious shoulder injury, Haas is a great player when fit and Federer will not take him lightly. Take him he will, however, and what a final we have in store then, assuming Murray does the same to Roddick.
Murray would take two negatives into that final. Firstly, there is that troublingly slow second serve. If the Fed can return Karlovic's fearsome first serve for winners, he will annihilate it on Sunday.
The second speaks for itself: he will be playing Roger Federer at Wimbledon.
The Swiss, meanwhile, will have two disadvantages of his own. The first is that, assuming he deals comfortably with Haas, he will enter the final without having had his nerve tested, and ring rustiness so far as handling moments of extreme danger can be lethal in tight matches.
The second is that he loathes playing Murray, who has that 6-2 winning record against him. He finds all the dinky spins and slices, the subtle variations in pace and the relentless demand to play extra shots so frustrating that he affects to consider Murray beneath his dignity.
Federer is an arrogant man, with sound reason, but the contempt he shows the Scot is born purely of fear.
If both play to their best, the Fed will win the contest on Sunday.
But the peculiar genius of Murray is that seldom (Wawrinka being an exception) does he allow anyone to play close to their best.
He has made Federer look mediocre before, and when you add an insanely raucous home crowd and Murray's desire to avenge his US Open hammering, the match becomes fiendishly tough to call.
First, of course, come those semis, neither of which is a gimme. Yet from the moment Rafael Nadal pulled out of the tournament, you sensed an internal dynamic driving the pair of them towards what I suspect will, regardless of the result, be another Centre Court final epic to resound down the ages.
