Roger Federer after defeating Nadal: "My children sang Happy Birthday"
Roger Federer played his four-set victory over Rafael Nadal in his 12th Wimbledon final - but he didn't want to be too emotional afterwards.
by Florian Goosmann from Wimbledon
last edit: Jul 13, 2019, 07:03 am
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster - and treat those two impostors just the same."
Rudyard Kipling's poem is always featured in Wimbledon reporting; These two lines are reproduced above the entrance to the Center Court. If only everything were so simple.
Treat triumph and disaster alike, it's the great art of life - and tennis. Barbora Strycova said on Thursday that she always reads these words when she came to the court, but it was so damn difficult to implement them. But: the older she gets, the closer she gets to it.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have visited the Center Court a little more often than the Czech, they have more than internalized the saying. If you saw the two of them in the press conference on Friday evening - Nadal just 20 minutes after the match, Federer about an hour later - you couldn't really differentiate between the content of what was said between the winner and the loser.
The experience? Age? Or Kipling's words? It's probably a mix of everything. Or a plan for the final. Federer was asked how he would recover from such a tough and emotional match if another of this kind was due in two days. "Age is good for you," he replied completely relaxed. "I know that it's not over yet. So there is no point in celebrating now or becoming too emotional to be too happy about it," said the 37-year-old - even if he was extremely happy right now. Thanks to his experience, he can separate these two matches well; if it were the end of the tournament, things would look different. But so it says: "Head down and stay focused."
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Federer before the Djokovic match: "Stars look good"
Especially since there are no secrets against Djokovic anyway. It depends on the form of the day, the mental state, who has more energy and who is there if it counts. There are no draws, and as I have shown today: If Nadal had done the rebreak in the fourth set, "maybe we would still play now".
He also wanted to take a relaxed day off on Saturday, it was all about relaxation and hitting a few balls. And tactics. "It's like school: You no longer have to read countless books on class work day, there is not enough time anyway. The work must have been done beforehand."
And Federer has that. "It was a very solid year for me. I won Halle, the stars are good. From this point of view, I can go into the match with great confidence."
Milan or Madrid, the main thing is Federer
So everything Roger at Federer and Friends? It seems so. With Mirka everything is pretty relaxed anyway, with him he doesn't talk much about tennis anyway, there are other things to do - "I usually only notice how tense she is during the match," he explained. And the kids: just been happy after the victory, even if the exact reasons were probably somewhat unclear. "They sang Happy Birthday. They probably somehow thought it was my birthday," said Federer and laughed.
Birthdays and won matches, triumphs and disasters, Federer and Nadal - the entire Wimbledon world free after Kipling? Federer explained: No, it was already clear that he had won. "But it was probably the only happy song they knew."
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