Published: 16 July, 2015
by RICHARD OSLEY

WOUNDED as I am by the suggestion on the letters pages inside that I know very little about tennis and, at risk of offending the greatest player of all time, can I whisper that it might be time for Roger Federer to hang up his tennis shoes. 

He has brought us the good times, opening up the sport to us all of us again after we had been pulped into a deadened boredom by Pete Sampras’s monotonous power-serve success. 

His rivalry with Nadal is one of sport’s great tales. But it’s because we’ve got so much to thank Fed for that we must wish the best for him as the years pass. 

Surely nobody wants to see him there, always searching, big-eyed and hopeful, for one more Slam each summer. The landscape has changed. Novak Djokovic is in steamroller mode now and while Federer beat our man Murray this year such success will not continue to be as simple. 

It’s going to get tougher and tougher to replay his magnificent past. The best way to go is as a champion like, say, Sir Alex Ferguson did after a similar reign of sporting dominance.

Federer’s told-you-so Wimbledon championship win in 2012 may have been the perfect time to drive off into the sunset. For it’s now three years without a major and you can almost feel his disappointment when matches like this weekend’s final against Djokovic start turning against him. He’ll be good enough to beat most players when he’s 50, but to see him wince his way through an unfulfilled search for another Slam will ache to watch.

• FOOTBALL fans often talk about the value of transfers as if they themselves are spending or receiving the money. 

In search of meaningless bragging points, they chunter on about who got the best deal. With no real insight into their club’s accounts, they can somehow tell us that it would be wrong to sell Raheem Sterling for £25 million, but demanding £49 million off Man City is a rip-off. This player is worth this, that player is worth that, and so on. 

But in a market which has lost all sense, what do these figures actually mean? If you can judge who is worth what in a world where the cost of a single player could fund 1,400 new nurses, or police officers, or care workers, and so on… then you deserve to rule the bar room debate. 

So go home, hail your favourite manager for striking a hard bargain and winning your club extra millions for a bank account you will never see.

• APOLOGIES, there are no Ashes jokes left in the cupboard in relation to Australia’s Shane Watson, master of LBW dismissals and the butt of some glorious mocking since England’s first Test win. 

The mass laugh-a-long at Watto’s expense may seem rather cruel and it seems likely the poor lad will be dropped for the second match. But those cocky-as-hell Aussies started the sledging first didn’t they? And half the fun of the Ashes is how it turns us all into playground big mouths.