The Australian tennis fan: none noisier. Green and yellow fright wigs? Inevitably. Face paint? It goes without saying. Flags as cloaks? Never entirely out of the question. Football-style chanting? Does the Pope have a balcony?

They were out in numbers yesterday for Lleyton Hewitt. Or “Little Lleyton”. Or “Rusty”. Or “Hewy”. Or “Ley”. It depends how you're feeling, and what you're shouting or singing, and when you're shouting or singing it. And sometimes it's none of the above. At those moments it's just “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie - oi, oi, oi”, which tends to get the message across equally well.

Nice routine during the knock-up, too. When Little Lleyton hits the ball, the fans in the fright wigs give out a big, low, beefy grunt, suggestive of their man's macho standing. When Hewitt's opponent (who just happens to be Roger Federer) hits it back, there's a high-pitched, girlie squeak, suggestive of the opposite. “Oof. Eek. Oof. Eek. Oof. Eek.” And so it goes on. Only in the knock-up, mind. Not in the match. That wouldn't be right.

“Oof. Eek. Oof. Eek.” Is this entirely fitting or fair? Well, obviously not. At the same time, Hewitt or no Hewitt, you can see how Federer might stand for a number of things that the Australian tennis fan - or certainly the unreconstructed Australian male tennis fan - would be broadly in protest against or willing to satirise. Cardigans, for instance. Monogrammed belts and shoes. A one-handed backhand. Jeez, mate. What is he, a Sheila?

Hewitt is all about punching above his weight - or, more specifically, punching above his height. When he completes one of those double-fisted, all-out cross-court backhands of his, he is virtually horizontal in the air at the conclusion of the stroke. It's not always pretty, but it's frequently effective.

Federer, on the other hand, is the supreme stylist, whose game seems to be approaching some kind of possibly unprecedented formal perfection, and sometimes doesn't even appear to require anything as vulgar as effort. It was grace in a cardy versus graft in a reversed baseball cap, for a place in the quarter-finals.

And to the disappointment and rapidly silencing despair of the wig-wearers, the cardigan crushed the grafter in straight sets, 7-6, 6-2, 6-4. If anyone was going “oof” here, it was Federer. And if anyone ended up going “eek”, it was Little Lleyton, the breath knocked clean out of him at times by the imagination and precision of his opponent's shot-making.

The scrapper had the slightest glimmer of a chance in the tie-break at the end of the first set when, in a rare moment of randomness from Federer, the players spent some time taking it in turns to drop service points, the No1 seed eventually winning 9-7. Had that tie-break gone the other way, we could have been in for something long and sweaty and Hewitt might have been able to dig down.

As it was, Federer lofted himself out of sight, breaking Hewitt twice straight away in the second set and moving smoothly to 4-0. No noise from the Aussie boys at this point, although they got loud again in the third set, standing loyally by their man even when all was clearly lost.

“The big points, he played a lot better than I did,” was Hewitt's solemn verdict, although this was true of many of the small points, too. The ominous fact is that Federer, who plays Mario Ancic in the next round, has still yet to lose a set in this tournament, nor even to look like losing one, leaving questions about his faltering form looking odd and leading one to wonder whether he may be on the verge of repeating the great “clean run” of 2006.

In the meantime, Little Lleyton was just so much collateral damage. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie - out, out, out. Federer triumphantly belted a ball high into the seating. Then, touchingly, he turned and lobbed his sweat bands to the Hewitt fans. The fans didn't toss them back, one noticed. They love him, really, you know, and why wouldn't they?