Polished and beautiful but Federer is beaten into the record books by Nadal.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

Truly remarkable. Less than a year ago Rafael Nadal was regarded as the Spanish clay-court specialist who would be hard pressed to win a major title on any surface other than the terre battue of the French Open. Now, with his prodigious victory over Roger Federer in the Australian Open final, he joins Andre Agassi as the only player in the 40 years of open tennis to have won a grand slam on each of the outdoor surfaces: clay, grass and hard.

Last July, by beating Federer in that epic Wimbledon final, Nadal confounded the theory that with a game made for clay he could never win on the skiddy grass courts of the All England Club. And now, in his first grand slam final on a hard court, he has succeeded where no Spaniard has before by winning the Australian Open with a thrilling 7--5, 3--6, 7--6 , 3--6, 6-2 victory over Federer, who remains stalled on 13 major titles, one behind Pete Sampras's record.

Nadal's tally now stands at six grand slams -- four French, one Wimbledon and one Australian -- and in all but the first of these, the 2005 French when he beat Mariano Puerta to take the title, the player he has beaten in the final has been Federer.

"I have always liked the competition more than the tennis," Nadal, 22, said recently, and maybe here we have the key to today's result and all those other victories over the Swiss master. Although it must be a difficult choice, you suspect Federer prefers the tennis to the competition -- and why wouldn't he with a game as polished and beautiful as his?

Sheer combative will saw Nadal through in a match in which the odds were heaped against him, not only because of Federer's hard-court pedigree but because of the soreness he must still have felt after spending more than five hours either side of midnight on Friday and Saturday winning his semi-final against a fellow Spaniard, Fernando Verdasco.

More specifically, the consistency of Nadal's groundstrokes, in their brutality and accuracy, did for Federer in what was a desperately tight match until the No2 seed, the winner at ...