After my post about Federer’s destruction of his good friend Ivan Ljubicic, a reader left a comment saying that Federer is boring because his game is so dominant and he is emotionally unexpressive on the court relative to someone like Nadal. She’s right. We much prefer to see someone pumping their fist and doing the lawnmower; someone who is down on their knees with joy at the sight of victory.

…Federer is boring because his game is so dominant and he is emotionally unexpressive on the court

What you see on the court with Federer is a guy with supreme confidence who is happy with his game and day to day life. When you’re down 4-1 in the first set of a Master Series final, as he was against James Blake today in the Indian Wells final, that comes in handy. “I’m always in control of how I need to play,” he said after the match, “what’s been happening, what I’ve got to do.”

Federer was calm but Blake was jumpy. After he went up two breaks of serve by taking the ball early and going for winners, Federer adjusted his game by hitting more backhand slices to blunt Blake’s power and drawing him to the net with short balls then passing him. Blake was still up a break serving for the set at 5-4 when it looked like he got a case of the nerves. He didn’t come in on a short ball as he had earlier and served a double fault to lose the game. You have to look for Federer’s hubris, but it’s there. When someone asked him, “At what point do you think you got on top of James?” Federer smiled and said, “After getting the second break back when I leveled the score, I knew it was going to be a tough one for him now.”

A Federer-Rafael Nadal final would not have ended like this

And it was. Vic Braden told me that he asked Federer how he developed so many more shots than any other player. Federer told him that he sat down and wrote a list of every shot he was likely to face and set about learning all of them. Here’s a sample. A drop shot off a drop shot: Blake hit a pretty good backhand drop shot cross court and Federer came in and hit his own backhand drop shot for a winner. A slice lob followed by a winning drop shot and, on the next point, a chip and charge return of serve.

Blake hung in there until 4-3 in the second set then lost his serve the rest of the way. Federer had a 7-5, 6-3, 6-0 win and his third consecutive Indian Wells title, the first man to do that.

A Federer-Rafael Nadal final would not have ended like this. All respect to Blake, he’s gone from number 14 to 9 in one week and he did, after all, beat Nadal. But Federer cannot dominate Nadal so handily. Nadal hopes to win Wimbledon some day but, for now, he’s the favorite on anything from a slow hard court to clay. This was a medium to slow hard court but the night-time cold and wind-chill factor during the Nadal-Blake match might have made a difference. The cold makes the court faster.

If people do come out to see Nadal play, once they’re here I hope they stick around long enough to appreciate Federer’s on court approach because it brings the attention to his tennis. It’s not one bludgeoning forehand followed by another, it’s a probing, subtle deconstruction of his opponent’s game.

The same person who called Federer boring also wrote: “I am completely in love with Federer as a person and I find the greatness of his game inimitable, so sharp, intelligent, elegant, clever, fluid, creative, subtle, almost a Jedi fluent with the force and a true master.”

I couldn’t say it any better.