RAFAEL Nadal, the boy who would be king, defeated the world No. 1 Roger Federer 6-2, 6-7 (2-7), 6-3, 7-6 (7-5) to retain his Master Series title, and in the process recorded his fourth victory in five meetings against the Swiss, two of them this year.
These have been Federer's only losses in a season in which he has already won the Australian Open, his seventh grand slam, and Masters Series titles in Indian Wells and Miami. But figuring out how to get the better of the 19-year-old, who defeated him in the final in Dubai two months ago, is becoming an increasingly knotty problem.
Federer had on Saturday suggested the more he played Nadal, the better it was for him: "He's quite one-dimensional." If this implied he felt he had discovered a way to tame the player described as "a beast" by Guillermo Coria last week, then he was rapidly disabused of such a notion.
It is the unadulterated intensity of Nadal's play, notably on clay — on which he has now gone 42 matches without defeat, a run bettered only by Guillermo Vilas (53) and Bjorn Borg (46) in the Open era — that makes him such a fearsome opponent.
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