Australian Open 2016: Angelique Kerber, The Champion No-One Saw Coming

This Australian Open began with a furore about match-fixing and finished for the women at least on Saturday night with the most astonishingly and wonderfully inexplicable result of all. This wasn't the upsetting of one match, but of the whole of the natural order of womens tennis. As Kerber herself said: "Now I can say I'm a grand slam champion. It sounds really crazy!"

Here's another way to look at it. The ultimate measure of Serena Williams is that all this century, the entire cohort of women tennis players has been out to get her, unavailingly. Fifteen different players have popped up out of that ruck to play her in finals, and 14 have been ruthlessly slapped back down. In finals, she was near to invincible, in Melbourne finals unbeaten. Here, she was playing to match Steffi Graf's aggregate of 22 major championships. But if records are there to be broken, history is also there to be made. Coolly, brilliantly, Angelique Kerber made it. "Unglaublich," her compatriots would say. Unbelievable.

For most of the night, not even an algorithm could have made sense of proceedings. When Kerber won the first set, half the world's data banks must have exploded. When she made an early break in the third, the other half must have self-immolated, too. When she made the winning break, even the hastily dusted- off abacuses would have fallen apart. But the centre court crowd could verify it all with their own ever widening eyes.

This, incidentally, is not to allege foul play, merely to try to come to grips with the brilliance and brazen-ness of Kerber, the blunderings of Williams and the scale of this upending. Williams had not lost a set for the tournament, in fact had lost only four service games. Kerber had almost lost in round one, falling match point behind Japan's Misaki Doi. The odds on what eventually transpired would have been incalculable then.

Even on final night, there was in the undertone a sense that Williams would come into her own and history to its senses. No-one wins a set from Serena. Ok, no-one wins two sets from Serena. Hmm, no-one, but no-one, wins finals against Serena. Champions create that effect. But the effect was lost on Kerber. When Williams wrested back the break in the third set, and was serving to level it, Kerber told herself: "You just broke her a few minutes ago." Then she did it again.

The ruling dynamic, it has to be said, was Williams's erraticism. In the first set, she made 23 unforced errors to Kerber's three. In the first set of her semi-final against Williams, Agnieszka Radwanska didn't often get to play. In the first set of the final, Kerber didn't much have to. By match's end, the error count was 46-13, a prodigious difference. For Williams, 46 errors was half as many again as the total in her six previous matches.

Williams missed short, long and wide. She filled the court with her squeals and screams of self-excoriation. Sometimes, you would have sworn Kerber's lefthandedness disoriented her; she hit to Kerber's backhand, realising only as the ball passed over the net that it was fore. The angles were all different, and Kerber kept measuring them off. As the match took its shape and direction, Kerber could see what she would have known beforehand, that all she had to do was to keep the ball in play. It is a big "all". But with deceptive poise, and then reassurance, and then aplomb, she did.

Williams won the second set on force of tennis personality, but she never really gathered up her game. She tried to change the rhythm of the match by looming large at the net, but one ball clipped it and hit her in the face.

Kerber's self-belief visibly grew, and did not waver even when Williams threatened one last sabre charge. Aptly, the final point of the match and championship was a Williams volley that flew too long. In the moment, Kerber looked even more shocked than Williams. Having pinched the title, she dared not pinch herself. The American was gracious, rounding the net to hug Kerber in her own court. That was where homage was now due.

But spare Williams this thought: what Kerber achieved this night dozens of others could have and should have and would have in the last 15 years, except Williams did not let them. It is a phenomenal record of sustained excellence. At last, she was been worn down. "Every time I walk on court, people expect me to win," she said. "As much as I would like to be a robot, and I try to, I'm not. Maybe someone else can be."

This result will take more than a night to process, and maybe the rest of the year. For Williams, maybe it won't ever settle comfortably. Meantime, that whirring you might be able to hear is data analysts hurriedly re-running the Djokovic/Murray stats for men's final through their hastily rebuilt machines.