Fed fells broken Cilic

It was a memorable milestone for Roger Federer, who became the first man in the history of the Wimbledon championships to lift the title eight times.

But it was not a memorable final. What we will remember is the despair of Marin Cilic, who came in carrying a damaged left foot - judging by the strapping around it - and then seemed to accentuate the problem when he slipped and fell in the fifth game of the match.

Early in the second set, the doctor and the trainer were called to attend to Cilic at a changeover. His distress soon overwhelmed him and he sat weeping into his towel, while Federer discreetly changed ends and returned to the court.

The spectators were concerned that that might be the end of the match. Already, 10 men had retired from the court in these championships because of injury, including Novak Djokovic in the quarter-final. The last time it happened in a men's final was in 1911, and we can be confident that there were not 15000 spectators watching that day, with a ticket costing almost £200 (about R3,414) in their pocket.

Cilic did at least choose to continue, and as a result he pulled off a near-impossible feat: turning the crowd against Federer on Centre Court. It wasn't that they wanted Cilic to win. They just wanted him to put up a fight, and extend the match somewhere close to the two-hour mark.

In terms of general competitiveness, the first four games represented the high-water mark. Cilic came out delivering the sort of thunderous ground strokes that had shunted Federer backwards in their US Open final of 2014 - a match that Cilic unexpectedly won in straight sets.

In the end, after Cilic had taken a medical at the start of the third set, an ace clinched Federer's 6-3 6-1 6-4 victory. It was the first time Federer had won Wimbledon without dropping a set, and only the second time anyone had done so in the Open era, after Bjorn Borg in 1976.

- © The Daily Telegraph