Is Marcos the ‘One’?

He might well be. Since I have always tried to embrace what life throws at me (as long as it’s happening 100,000 miles away to people I’ve only seen on the other side of a celluloid screen ;)), I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that I’m not going to be watching a Nalbandian-Federer final, come Sunday. So, I decided to do the next best thing: warm up to this newbie and resort to the most therapeutic sport of all – write about it (Andy should try some of that, I think. If he’s anywhere near as eloquent on paper as he is in person, and if he wields a pen better than he wields a racket, he could come up with some masterpieces).

Barring the very real possibility of a disappointing straight sets victory as is often the case in a men’s final sporting Roger Federer, the grand finale seems pretty promising.

Let’s face it – we needed a newcomer to try and match up to this man. Roddick has absolutely no valid answers, and probably the most effective strategy for him would be the one he’s often opined: punching Federer in the locker room (which just might work). Hewitt for the most part is out of the men’s tour, if his competitiveness this slam (or lack thereof) is anything to go by. Agassi is quite visibly in his final throes, however much zeal he has left in him. Nadal couldn’t effectively tackle Roger anywhere except the painfully slow courts of Paris. Safin, quite inarguably, has the game to beat Federer, but last time I checked, you gotta be there to do it ;) And Sampras, probably our safest bet, is no longer around. So, maybe, just maybe it has to be a 20-year old Cypriot who’s taken the world by storm with as much his shot-making as his passion and intensity, not to mention that irrepressibly (it seems) disarming smile :)

Philosophy apart, even technically, he seems to have a game to match Roger’s: a powerful serve for a powerful serve and one ingenious forehand too many. Not only is he an athletic all-court player, using practically every shot in the bag – bounding up and down with his exuberance, as we’ve seen over the past couple weeks – he also seems to have a very solid service game. We know one-dimensional big servers don’t do well with Roger (think Andy) cos he effortlessly smashes returns to the most impossible of serves and the baseliners, for their part, are pretty much left scurrying around the court, thanks to his versatile shot placement (flashback: Lleyton, cos past tense is perhaps fitting here ;)).

Few would argue that Safin is probably Federer’s closest matched contemporary, what with his innovative shot-making, that awesome serve, impeccable groundstroke and a lethal backhand that comes closer to rivaling the Swiss’s own than any in recent memory. Now, Baghdatis seems to share Safin’s all-court coverage, his high-powered ace and his return of serve was pretty incredible against Andy. And from the little we’ve seen of the fiesty Marcos, he seems far more mentally tough than the temperamental Russian ever was. I’ve also seen some almost Federer-esque forehands from the kid, which, coming from me, is saying a whole heckuva lot. Not to mention the fact that he’s just making his debut and perhaps a thousand times hungrier.

While I don’t expect him to beat Roger on Sunday (a belief instigated by wishful thinking, but made more credible following watching his ruthless demolition of a more than aggressive Kiefer into the wee hours this morning), I think the talented Cypriot will come pretty close. Roger has a 3-0 head-to-head against him, but let’s face it, Hewitt had a 7-0 lead over the Swiss maestro at some archaic point in time.

Times change and the past three weeks have belonged to a certain Baghdatis and quite rightly so...