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

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?