HOW apt that Rafael Nadal should become one of the grand champions of tennis at 18 by running down the favoured ploy of Guillermo Coria and drilling past him the last shot of a final of more splendid curves and undulations than this pretty place by the sea.

Nadal might have defeated Roger Federer in the Nasdaq-100 Open denouement in Key Biscayne, Florida, a fortnight previously but could not quite finish the job. Yesterday, on another day of dreary weather that mirrored the week-long mourning for Prince Rainier, Nadal came of age in a fashion so spectacularly significant that he reduced Coria — 2004’s annointed King of Clay — to a mood in which he could barely bring himself to acknowledge the victor at the prize-giving ceremony.

Perhaps it is hard to accept that a youngster can play at such a level on a court where you had been triumphant a year earlier, beginning a sequence of success on the surface that led to the final of the French Open where the trophy was for the taking.

Coria may put that one to rights in June, but he knows that there is a new kid on the block with ambitions matching his physique. Nadal won 6-3, 6-1, 0-6, 7-5 in 3hr 7min, the day after he had been just about able to resist Richard Gasquet, his fellow teenager, in a 2hr 45min semi-final. From where does the Spaniard dredge such powers, how does he stay in the points when he should be out of them, how immense is the belief in himself? Yet, thankfully, he remains a shy, undemonstrative lad at heart.

He certainly loses all inhibitions when he steps out inside the white lines. He is now up to No 11 in the Indesit ATP rankings and, behind Federer, is the second most successful player on the circuit this year. This was his third title of 2005, all on clay, but none more important than this, his initial Masters Series. Last night he was on a plane to Barcelona, another airport, another tournament, where the reception should be heady.

Time will tell if he is overplaying himself to a dangerous extent when he needs to hold as much as he can in check for Paris, where every match is the best of five sets. When he took his foot off the gas in the third set yesterday, Coria sneaked back into the final, although the 6-0 scoreline barely reflected the intensity of the struggle. Almost every point was a real contest and Nadal was able to put the loss of the set straight to the back of his mind.

In that, he is special too. Coria tried to unnerve him by utilising the drop shot, a ruse he uses better than anyone in the game, and Nadal chased down every single one of them. Some he reached, some he didn’t, no matter. He sprinted from the blocks in the fourth, led 4-1 (thanks to a wonderful forehand lob after another successful pursuit of a drop shot) and had three chances to lead 5-1, before the Argentinian responded by striking more purposefully through the ball than he had all match.

Nadal hung in to lead 6-5 and when Coria teetered, the Spaniard forced two match points, sacrificing the first to a forehand winner but, probably expecting the drop shot, he charged it down and swept a forehand of his own into the corner before collapsing, spreadeagled, into the dust.