When Centre Court served up a miracle This admission will probably strike the Editor as yet another embossed invitation to give me the sack, but I am simply not up to the task of conveying, to the unsporty among you, the seismic nature of the earthquake generated on Centre Court on Thursday night. No non-sporting analogy is adequate. Elfin Treasury minister Chloe Smith duffing up Paxo so viciously on Newsnight that he resigns on air, mid-interview, citing his own incompetence? Bob Diamond beating a flaxen-haired three-year-old who fought off a gang of armed robbers with her dolly on the very day she discovered the cure for cancer, to a Pride of Britain Award? Two Ton Tessie O'Shea edging out Angelina Jolie to become the first posthumous International Celebrity Rear of the Year? None of the above comes close to matching the outlandishness of Lukas Rosol's five-set defeat of Rafael Nadal. David and Goliath isn't in it. David had a catapult, and Jehovah as his cornerman. But had this Czech of previously unimpeachable obscurity deployed a dozen AK47-armed Taliban snipers cunningly positioned in the players" box, you still wouldn't have given him an earthly. In the early rounds of major tournaments, after all, the Spaniard is as invulnerable as Achilles. Not Homer's Achilles, mind - the other Achilles, whose mother had the wit to dip his infant heel in the Styx along with the rest of him. Only Novak Djokovic had a prayer of beating the Raging Mallorcan Bull in a grand slam, and only then after a monumental struggle in the final. Or so the received wisdom held. How the world number 100 transformed this into the received ignorance ranks among the most glorious things witnessed in sport. A portion of the glory lay in the bewildering grace of the loser, who hung about to accompany his conqueror off court where anyone else would have stormed straight to the locker room to hunt out the strychnine. One reason why Nadal is my all-time favourite sportsman is the paradox that the most ferocious beast on court is the most mannerly, modest and sweet-natured pussycat off it. Many of our native sportsmen try to emulate him in this, of course. Sadly, being easily confused, they tend to be pussies on the field of play and animals off it. Another chunk of the glory lay in the manner of Rosol's win. It is virtually a sporting axiom that a journeyman on the brink of a major upset is a journeyman about to choke. Sometimes this is heartbreaking to behold (the barefoot Jean van der Velde, golf's Devon Loch, trying to strike his ball from a creek when poised to win The Open). Sometimes you shrug resignedly, as when the Englishman Barry Cowan took Pete Sampras to a fifth set at Wimbledon, before meekly concluding that this was as far as the fantasy need go. But it invariably happens when the immensity of what they are on the point of achieving hits home. To say that Rosol did not choke, although technically correct, is a reductio ad dementum. You might as usefully observe that Nicholas Soames didn't stint himself at Wilton's when the beef trolley reached his table. He brutalised Nadal in that closing set with a nerveless barrage of aces and scything, line-catching ground strokes the like of which no one watching could recall. The only person more astonished by the impudence than Nadal, it later emerged, was Rosol himself. One must always take care not to become florid when writing about trivial games. Yet here was one of those moments when sport burst free of its gravitational limits, and transcended itself. As match point came up, my wife, who regards all sport as if it were anthrax, rushed into the room yelling "Have you heard what's happening to Rafa?" As if she expected to catch me enraptured by a Sky Arts documentary about Gustav Klimt. Moments such as these must be savoured and treasured. Wastrels like me who spend thousands of hours each year watching sport on telly (I regard the weird obsessiveness as a symptom of an undiagnosed spectrum disorder called "spautism") are like truffle pigs. We drudge interminably through the dross in the hope of finding something priceless to remind us why we bothered in the first place: Usain Bolt winding down from little more than halfway en route to obliterating the world 100m record; 42-1 no-hoper James Douglas knocking out the Nadalesque Mike Tyson in Tokyo; Rafa himself beating Federer for the 2008 Wimbledon title just as the dusk descended over the greatest match ever played; Kenny Dalglish getting through a two-minute post-match interview without the producer screaming "Send for the UN interpreter." Events that challenge all the orthodoxies, and have you leaping out of the armchair murmuring "But I never knew it could be this way" come, if you're lucky, twice a decade. The Cinderella from Slovakia provided an absolute classic. He will revert to a pumpkin long before any scheduled semi-final against Andy Murray, and very likely in his third-round match today. The laws of sporting physics cannot be suspended indefinitely, and a reaction is almost inevitable. But on Thursday night he not only went to the ball. In destroying one of tennis's immortals, he became a demigod himself. Call it a fairy tale, magic realism or a plain miracle, the flavour of watching in slack-jawed stupefaction as Lukas Rosol steamrollered Rafael Nadal will live in the memory long after we have all forgotten his name.