Roger Federer's fall signals end of Fab Four 

Roger Federer denies the end is nigh, but he also saw this coming 12 years ago, when he knocked out his hero Pete Sampras in round one.

"Later I saw him sitting in the locker room with his head down," Federer has said, "and I thought, sure, I'm going to go through moments like this in my career." The foretaste of decline and fall was brief for the greatest of men's tennis players, who went on to win 17 grand slam titles and seven Wimbledon crowns.

With each victory came an inflation of his aura and his self-belief, which even now refuses to be weakened by a comprehensive second-round defeat to Sergiy Stakhovsky. Federer said of his fans: "They'll get over it. I'll get over it." But will he? Will tennis? The age of the big four - one of the greatest concentrations of talent ever in any sport - looks to be breaking up, along with the age of elegance ushered in by Federer, who took a TARDIS from the 1920s to take over from Sampras.

Revisiting Rafael Nadal's first-round exit here, and Federer's fall two days later, you see just how blessed men's tennis has been over the past 10 years, and how Wimbledon might struggle for glamour, brilliance and edge if the quartet is reduced to a duo of Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. In any other age, a rolling Djokovic-Murray power struggle would be enough by itself, but tennis has grown fat and happy on its menu of Swiss virtuoso, Spanish demon, Scottish homeboy and Serbian warrior.

Many experts feel Federer has already fallen off the edge of this distinguished group and expect Nadal to follow, on grass at least, as the task of winning the French Open on clay eats ever deeper into his chances of adding to his two Wimbledon titles. Trepidation was apparent here on day four as a relatively underwhelming Centre Court programme was laid before the crowd. Match two on the most sacred turf in tennis: Agnieszka Radwanska v Mathilde Johansson.

Yesterday opened without Federer, Nadal, Maria Sharapova, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Caroline Wozniacki: all either beaten or injured. Wimbledon's chief selling points - order, gentility, tradition - have remained immune to the mutations of modern sport. In fact people come here to escape them. But it needs stars and it needs competitive tension, as we saw when 6ft 5in men were winning matches through the sniper fire of aces and three?shot rallies.

Audiences nowadays are harder to please and less loyal. The departures of Nadal and Federer will have rattled a few All England plutocrats while reminding the rest of us how privileged we have been to watch four such distinguished players trade blows not only at Wimbledon but in Paris, Melbourne and New York. No modern sportsman will descend a bigger slope than Federer. Lionel Messi, perhaps, if he suddenly starts playing as if Cristiano Ronaldo has tied his laces together. Federer's brilliance has been fading in increments, but without a single jolt to alert the obituarists.

Many now feel he has crossed the point of no return, where a great sportsman's faith in his own talent starts colliding with the reality of results. No athlete is more tightly associated either with a single sporting stage than Federer with Centre Court.

With added Swiss precision, he is the artist the All England Club would have designed to show Wimbledon to the world as a place of grace and finesse. His second-round defeat to an opponent ranked 116 in the world on Wednesday was presented as a flash of sensational giant killing in a tournament that seems to have developed a penchant for churning out news.

Behind the unusually juicy first?week headlines, though, there is a growing sense that Federer, now approaching 32, is entering the self?deluding stage when he says he will be contesting grand slam titles for "many more years". You hope he is right. You hope his beautifully rhythmic movements and soft hands will continue to inspire more eulogies, in America, for example, where David Foster Wallace wrote a famous piece headed 'Federer as Religious Experience', and Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker expressed the "pain" felt by his disciples when he loses, as if an offence against nature had been committed. Fifteen years ago Federer won the boys' title here. Then he won the first of his seven senior titles in 2003.

"I had this incredible talent people were talking about," he recalled last week. Hey: this is a man with a lot to be immodest about; a star whose brief lapse into monogrammed cardigans and Gatsby chic only added to his appeal. In the Tomkins piece, Federer said: "After I beat Pete [Sampras], I felt sort of uncomfortable shaking his hand, almost sad." Stakhovsky talked a bit like that on Wednesday. But we will never witness a more elegant decline.