13/11/11 - 17:34

The dream final line-up got the dream winner, as Roger Federer finally won his first ever BNP Paribas Masters, and his 18thATP Masters 1000 title, with a 6-1, 7-6(3) victory over 2008 winner Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. The Swiss was taken to a tie-break for the first time in a tournament where he did not drop a set, such was his dominance throughout the week.

With Rafael Nadal absent and Novak Djokovic suffering with an ailing shoulder, the time was right for Federer to secure one of the few big trophies which had eluded him to date. And when his main hard-court rival Andy Murray was taken out in a three-set, three-hour quarter-final epic by Tomas Berdych, the Swiss needed no second bidding. He brushed aside the fatigued Berdych in the semis and then never allowed Tsonga to settle in a match that was perhaps even more one-sided than the score-line suggests.

After half-an-hour, it looked as if we were going to witness the quickest final since Boris Becker was forced to retire against Stefan Edberg after just 38 minutes in 1990. Though Federer was not at his imperious best, he was still a step ahead of Tsonga at every turn and rattled off the first set in double-quick time.

In the second however it was the local hero who was hitting the winners, with the legend struggling ever so slightly to keep pace. In the eighth game Federer could not even buy a first service but he survived, as he so often does. It was a close call though and the scoreboard even read 5-3 for a fleeting moment – the time it took chair umpire Lars Graff to overrule a call on a Tsonga forehand that had indeed just failed to clip the baseline.

That was as close as it got for the Frenchman. Federer twice served to save the set, at 4-5 and 5-6, and held at a canter both times, breezing through the latter game in the grand total of 67 seconds. Pressure? What pressure? It was Tsonga who was about to find out just what pressure was. He was mini-broken on the first point of the tie-break, five shots later it was 3-0 and the match was as good as over. Federer took the tie-break 7-3, raising his arms aloft as a Tsonga groundstroke sailed beyond the baseline.

The crowd was naturally disappointed that, for the second year in a row, the favourite had defeated the Frenchman in the title match (and by near-identical score lines, Robin Söderling having seen off Gaël Monfils 12 months earlier dropping two fewer points in the tie-break). But they lauded Federer as one of their own and revelled, with him, in the moment as one of the greatest players of all time finally added one of the biggest tournaments to his trophy cabinet.