With Wimbledon win, Marion Bartoli registers a victory for free spirits everywhere

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: there’s nothing like a Grand Slam final to validate every seemingly rubbish quality that a player possesses. Marion Bartoli has endured a healthy dose of snide comments over the years, about not just her game, but also her personality. We have cringed at her quirky, start-stop service motion; we have laughed at her incessant up-and-down jumping between points; we have sneered at her self-proclaimed IQ of 175 (which, if true, would place her higher than Albert Einstein in the hierarchy of intelligent people through the history of mankind); and we have pitied her for being saddled with a seemingly obsessive-compulsive, mad scientist father.

Does any of that matter now? With her 6-1, 6-4 victory over Sabine Lisicki, Bartoli has inscribed her name in the record books for eternity. She is a Grand Slam champion now – a Wimbledon champion – and suddenly, all of those previously distasteful quirks and oddities have started looking positively endearing.

To say that this was an unexpected result would probably be the understatement of the year. Even after Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka hurtled out of the tournament on Black Wednesday, Bartoli would have been the last person on anyone’s mind – or at least the last person out of the top 15 – who could have been expected to triumph on the second Saturday. There was last year’s champion Serena Williams, and when she left, there was last year’s runner-up Agnieszka Radwanska; there was former champion Petra Kvitova, and former French Open champion Li Na; then there was, of course, Serena’s conqueror, Lisicki herself.

Bartoli was the heavy underdog coming into today’s final, even if the rankings may not say so. She hadn’t faced a top 10 player on her way to the summit clash, and was facing the prospect of playing against the woman who had not just ended Williams’s 34-match winning streak, but also curbed her infamous inconsistencies long enough to outlast that master tactician Radwanska in a high-quality semifinal, perhaps the best women’s match of the year so far. How do you prepare yourself to play someone on a hot run like that?

Well, it seems Bartoli’s plan was to completely ignore the opponent and the occasion. She was playing on the biggest stage in tennis, with a million eyes fixated on every move she made, but she went about hammering her two-fisted groundstrokes like she was playing in her backyard. Bartoli did a fantastic job of blocking out all the distractions and focusing on her game; such a fantastic job, in fact, that even when Lisicki made a rousing late charge, saving two match points at 1-5 in the second set before winning three consecutive games to bring the score to 4-5, you never really felt that Bartoli would succumb to the pressure.

The Frenchwoman wasn’t quite ‘in the zone’ – that mythical phase that tennis players get into every once in a while, when everything they touch turns to gold – but she was in her own zone all through the match. Right from the start – with the exception of that first game where she double faulted twice to get broken – Bartoli did everything that she does best and played to her strengths.

She stood close to the baseline and took the ball on the rise – even Lisicki’s 115mph serves – and made the slower German move to uncomfortable areas of the court by constantly redirecting the ball. She kept going after her flat second serve despite making as many as six double faults, thus never allowing Lisicki to tee off on the return. She moved better than I’ve ever seen her move (or maybe I just got that feeling because I never really watched any of her previous matches carefully enough), and made Lisicki pay dearly for going to the drop shot well once too often. Bartoli was determined to make sure that she left no stone unturned in her bid to taste eternal glory, and no one can begrudge her the place in history that she’s now carved for herself.

For Lisicki, this was a tough reality check after a fairy-tale fortnight. She was an emotional wreck for the better part of the afternoon, and her game came completely unstuck in the biggest match of her life. You could say that this was a new and frightening situation for her so she should be forgiven for failing to handle it with the calmness and composure she had displayed all through the tournament. But that doesn’t change the fact that her horribly erratic play made this one of the most severely disappointing Slam finals in recent memory – and we’ve seen quite a lot of those on the women’s side lately.

Like Petra Kvitova two years ago, Lisicki showed us through her first six matches of the tournament the damage that no-holds-barred offensive play can do on grass. There have been critics of the modern version of the women’s game, which is heavily dependent on power and first-strike tennis but woefully short on defensive skill, but why should you bother with defense at all when you can blast rocket serves and forehands the way Lisicki did up to the final? Unfortunately for Lisicki though, she couldn’t make it last till the end, and left the tournament on the back of an absolute clanger of a performance.

Lisicki’s power-packed game can go off the rails as easily as her smile can light up a room, and she’ll probably learn to live with that. She can afford to make a few mistakes here and there as long as she alternates those errors with untouchable winners, something that you can count on her to do. But what she cannot afford to do the next time she’s in a Grand Slam final is giving in to her nerves.

There’s no easy way to say this, but some of the errors that Lisicki made today were, for a professional player playing on Centre Court, downright disgusting. She simply couldn’t keep the ball in the court for any reasonable stretch of time today. After she made one particularly ghastly double fault, she broke into a smile of resignation, but as charming as her smile is, I couldn’t muster a hint of sympathy for her. That was how bad her play was.

Lisicki did redeem herself a little by putting together that stirring three-game run after saving those two match points, but it was too little and far too late. At the end of it all, the enduring image we will have of Lisicki from the 2013 Wimbledon tournament is of her sobbing uncontrollably in the face of defeat.

The woman is still only 23 years old, so we can expect that she will have more chances to win silverware at the Majors. And I, for one, hope that she will use her disappointment – which was manifested so painfully through her tears – as a source of motivation to give a better account of herself and her game the next time she’s in such a situation. Why do I hope that? Let me indulge in a bit of frivolity here by saying that her smile is too dazzling to never be seen next to a Grand Slam trophy.

For now though, the smiles and the frivolity are all reserved for Bartoli and her camp, as she celebrates becoming the fifth-oldest first-time Slam winner in the Open era. Those strange-looking stylistic eccentricities and those funky training methods may still not find a place in any coaching manual, but their validity cannot be questioned any more. Winning the ultimate prize in tennis is a feat that commands respect, and Bartoli, quirks and all, has unequivocally earned the respect of every tennis watcher in the world.

Bartoli’s victory today is not just a victory for herself, but a victory for free spirits everywhere. In that respect, the women’s edition of the 2013 Wimbledon may end up being remembered as one of the most momentous editions of all time. Not bad for a ‘boring’, star-less tournament, right?