Boris Becker column: I am not ruling out a Federer-Nadal final

What a day! Sunday saw the biggest upsets of the tournament so far with both the men and women’s top seeds out of the Australian Open within hours of each other.

So, it’s now the first time since 2002 that both the top seeds haven’t reached the quarter-finals here.

Obviously, I follow and support Angie, so I am quite upset. She was a bit patchy earlier but picked up her form in her last match. However, she was clearly outplayed by the young American Coco Vandeweghe.

Andy was the man in form and was looking good in the first couple of matches. His being beaten by Mischa Zverev, a German journeyman, who was ranked 1,000 two years ago and whose claim to fame is being the older brother of Alexander Zverev — is very surprising to say the least.

It was Mischa’s style that did Murray in. He was serving and volleying after the first, and often the second serve and playing a lot of slides, a lot of low balls even on the forehand, with not with much pace.

This is something Murray is not used to; he’s used to players playing with a lot of top spin, playing from the baseline and playing long rallies. But Mischa played old school tennis and caught him off-guard.

With Novak (Djokovic) gone and Murray losing, suddenly there’s a whole new atmosphere here. Novak’s loss has opened up bottom half and Murray’s loss, the top. So I think anybody, and I mean anybody, left in the tournament has a chance now.

I was sad by Novak’s loss. I’m still close to him and have tremendous respect for him — so I was very, very emotional. But this just shows that when you are not 100 per cent when you play against a guy who has nothing to lose, which was the case with Denis Istomin, when you perhaps start a match a little bit too relaxed or too sure of the win, all of a sudden it turns into a battle.

So, it goes to show that he has to take every tournament seriously from the get-go and that no match is won beforehand.

I wouldn’t rule out a Federer-Nadal final — all tennis fans would love that — but Stan Wawrinka is still in it and you have the younger ones like Dominic Thiem and David Goffin, and Milos Raonic is there too. It’s still a very strong tournament and I couldn’t really pick one: that’s why I pick everybody!

It will be for the first time in a couple of years that we will have a winner on the men’s side that isn’t Andy or Novak. So we may have a new, or even a “new-old” champion now that the second week will start, for the first time, without the top two men’s players in the world.

On the ladies’ side, Serena looks in wonderful form. I have tremendous love and respect for her and my feeling is that we could see her in the final again. Then there are the dark horses like Jo Konta from Great Britain — she won the warm-up at Sydney last week, and beat Caroline Wozniacki in straight sets on Saturday — and Garbine Muguruza, who won on Sunday, and is looking better than anybody else.

— Gameplan