Around 90 minutes after Roger Federer had made his dramatic exit from Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal found himself circling the same plughole.

He had botched four set points in the second-set tie-break, the third of them in the most disastrous style as he dumped both his serves into the net. He seemed to be paying for it as Juan Martin del Potro – one of very few men with an even more destructive forehand than his own – soon moved ahead by a 2-1 margin in sets.

But Nadal was not going to fade out of the picture. With the ball jumping up off this rock-hard ground into his strike zone, he surely knows that this could be the best opportunity he ever has to lift a third Wimbledon title.

And so he tweaked his tactics, subtly but significantly. He started coming forward and using the delicate hand skills that we forget about when he is blasting huge groundstrokes from the back of the court. One sliced, inside-out drop shot, played early in the final set, was such a feat of prestidigitation that you wondered if Nadal was a member of the Magic Circle.

It felt like a shame that this superb contest was probably not picking up the TV viewership that it deserved. The players could have functioned as an advert for washing powder, so long did they spend on the ground. In some cases this was the result of a diving volley, but more often it was the giraffe-like del Potro who lost his footing on the turf. He even finished the final point of the match in a prone position as Nadal rushed in to put away a volley winner and close out his 7-5, 6-7, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4 win.