epicness

I must say the word to describe these two days at best would be 'epicness'. First of all, I stayed up late to watch the men's Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Addy Roddick. To all those who miss this truly outstanding match, for starters, the match lasted 4 hours and 17 minutes to be exact, not the longest in Wimbledon's history but long enough nevertheless. Basically, my first thoughts of the match were it would be a walk over for Federer because looking at the statistics between him and Roddick, out of the 20 head to head encounters between the both of them, Federer has won 18 while Roddick bagged only two wins. Such were the odds stacked against Roddick. The match started well, with neither player breaking each other's service game until the last part where Roddick broke Federer's serve to take the first set.

My heart started pounding at this stage. It started to pound even harder when Roddick was on the verge of taking the second set during the tie break at 5-1 to Roddick. Luckily, Federer rallied with a string of points to take the second set and it was back to business as usual. Federer went on to take the third set and I was convinced that Federer was going to win. But as fast as it came, the momentum shifted quickly to Roddick's favour and he took the fourth set. It now burned down to the fifth and final set where there were no tie-breaks. Each player kept up his tempo of the game; neither managing to break each other's serve. It was way past one a.m. here in Singapore and the match was still on at 13-13. By this time, I'm sure both players were emotionally, physically and mentally drained. One could tell by the number of unforced errors they made. At long last, Federer managed to break Roddick's serve and went on to win championship point...

Roger Federer, age 27 has now won 15 grand slam titles; 6 Wimbledon crowns, 5 US open titles, 3 Australian open trophies and 1 French open consolation. He has overtaken the American Pete Sampras in numbers of grand slam titles and joins a group of a special six beside Rod Laver, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras who holds all four grand slam titles. Federer is also the second man to regain the World Number One ranking in tennis history if I remember correctly (I can't remember the other's guy's name). I guess nothing more needs to be said about this Swiss maestro. History beckons for itself...