Federer fundamentalists have visions of jolly Roger’s 18th slam

THERE are many reasons why we play sport, and here is one of the most important: sport gives us a chance to create beauty

Roger Federer has a good chance to win Wimbledon.

THERE are many reasons why we play sport, and here is one of the most important: sport gives us a chance to create something beautiful. All of us. It’s a beauty-opp. I’ve even done it myself: not many and not often and not beautiful by the standards of, say, Botticelli or Bach, Roger Federer or David Gower — but I’ve made a beautiful save, taken a beautiful catch, ridden a beautiful clear round. My life is richer as a result. Quite a lot richer. It is one of the reasons why Federer is still out there and competing, aged 32, wealthy far beyond want, having won everything a man could hope to win, and with most people reckoning that he will never win another grand-slam tournament.

Watch a point from his match yesterday. Just about any one will do, but a dozen or more were, well, ever so slightly like The Birth of Venus or the Goldberg Variations. There always are with Federer, even in defeat.

Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings? If you could fly like one, you wouldn’t ask. And if you could create points as beautiful as Federer can, why would you ever want to stop? As I watched Federer play Tommy Robredo in the fourth round, it was perfectly clear why Federer is still out there playing tennis: it’s because he loves the stuff. He loves the feeling of ball on racket, to create lovely points, lovely games, lovely sets.

He created a lovely match — lovely for him, anyway — as he beat Robredo 6-1 6-4 6-4 in a shade more than 90 minutes. Two 32-year-olds, and two one-handed backhands, so the match had something of a retro feel.

A few match facts: Federer won the first seven points in the first set and the first three games. He won the first nine points of the second. In that set he won every service game to love. He faced a single break point throughout, and that in the last game. He is yet to lose his serve in the tournament, still less a set.

He dominated every phase of the match with that expression of tolerant amusement on his face: an uncle amusing a child in the back garden.

Robredo beat Federer at this stage in the US Open last year, but could not live with him yesterday. And now there is a bit of a buzz going around these courts. The one-last-slam-for-Rodge party is finding new members with every set he wins. I think he could do it — but how much of that is about wishes being father to thoughts, and how much is sober sporting assessment?

Certainly Wimbledon is the best chance he has of picking up another big one. It would be his 18th slam, and his eighth title in SW19.

At Wimbledon the rallies are shorter, likewise the matches, and the surface is more forgiving — quite apart from the fact that Federer in his prime was unplayable on it. His last slam was here: he won in 2012, beating a weeping Scotsman in the final.

He played the equally Swiss Stanislav Wawrinka in the ­quarter-finals overnight, and he is no pushover.

The problem for Federer is not just that each one is very good, but that they are coming at him in a pack. He could win any single match and against any one of the top players, but three of them one after the other? Such a series of brutal encounters makes you feel the creak and clunk of ageing limbs and battle-weary mind.

But right now Federer is feeling great. “I’m very happy with my game, I’ve been in control throughout almost all the matches, and looking forward to Stan’s match,” he said.

He was wearing his most characteristic expression — characteristic of his palmist days — that of a very expensive pedigree cat that has just dined on cream and the pet canary. In such moods, he reminds me of the Nancy Mitford character Cedric Hampton, an exquisite who sometimes refers to himself as “lovely one”: how lovely it is to be lovely one. He ends up having one’s ­wonderful cake and eating it.

Federer’s match yesterday was interrupted by one protestation of love and one marriage proposal, both from males. How the crowd tittered: but this is still a religious nation, and belief in Federer fundamentalism runs very deep.

If the beauty I have created in sport has given me untold pleasure, what must it be like to multiply that several millions times and be Roger Federer? No wonder he is still playing. Extreme beauty warning: expect it sometime this afternoon. Lovely one is back in action.

THE TIMES