London: A photograph was doing the rounds on Wednesday which suggested that Rafael Nadal is no different from the rest of us.
There he was snapped looking baffled by a self-service checkout at the Wimbledon branch of Tesco.
We have all suffered like him, failing to address bagging-area decorum.
But Donald Young will have confirmed that when it comes to tennis, there is nothing remotely normal about Nadal.
As the former Boys’ Champion here will assert, this is a player approaching the very peak of his form, a champion in waiting.
Nadal beat the world No. 43 in straight sets, 6-4, 6-2, 7-5 with a straightforward dispatch that at times was contemptuous.
Except contempt is not a word that should ever be used in association with the ever-respectful Spaniard.
It has long been a myth to suggest Nadal cannot cope with grass.
What he has struggled with is the pristine greenery in the early stages of Wimbledon.
But this week the weather is perfectly suiting the great clay-court master, the grass shrivelling up before our eyes, the ball bouncing higher as the surface bakes.
It has long been the case the longer he can stay in the SW19 tournament, the more potent Nadal becomes.
And this week he is already looking potent. The way he scampered around court with puppy-dog enthusiasm insisted this is a man on a mission to equal Bjorn Borg’s achievement of winning a seasonal double of French Open and Wimbledon for a third time.
To reinforce his sense of purpose, he broke Young’s serve in the very first game, and from there set a pattern which barely wavered: his own service games were won with nary an interruption while all of Young’s services were challenged in a flurry of deuces.
He broke him in the first game of the second set too, as if to reinforce the chasm in class.
And while Young managed to hold his own at the start of the third, and indeed break Nadal for the first time as he was serving for the match, it was never enough.
There were times when Young looked at the space between where he was standing and where Nadal had just fizzed the ball and wondered how on earth he had not got there to meet it.
Plus, while Young would push a potential winner into the net or send it long, Nadal would send his own winners into the very places his rival could not chase.
And when Young threatened parity, Nadal would narrow his eyes and give full rein to his competitive instinct with a thumping, decisive shot.
This is the difference between the best and the rest: Nadal simply refuses to countenance defeat. Now in the third round he goes on to play Karen Khachanov of Russia on Friday, who beat Thiago Montiero in four sets. In this sort of mood, you suspect it is the tills at Tesco that will probably give Nadal more trouble.
