A colleague bears the scars of a brush with a television mechanic carrying a load of cables that blocked his way into the elevator, which used to be required to reach the top of the Louis Armstrong Stadium press box. It was approaching deadline but the TV man was not for moving. “Hey buddy, this is the CBS Open,” he said as the door slammed shut. It always was, it still is.

When the schedules for the two weekends of the Open are decided, the tournament officials have first to gain the approval of Bob Mansbach, the CBS executive producer. If he does not like what he sees, the paper is ripped up and the schedulers start again. Hence the furore generated when the semi-final between Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray was switched to Louis Armstrong, the stadium that was superseded as the No1 venue by the construction of the Arthur Ashe Stadium 11 years ago.

The debacle that followed easily could have been avoided. Roger Federer skipped ominously into the final on Ashe and Murray and Nadal were forced to start 90 minutes later because three forecasters could not make up their minds about when Tropical Storm Hanna would be unleashed on Queens. As a result, their semi-final was interrupted when beautifully poised on Armstrong.

Nadal's camp took the unusual step of issuing a statement to a press agency insisting that he was happy to play whenever and wherever the schedulers put him. One understands, though, that Nadal was not entirely convinced that Federer against Novak Djokovic should have been given the first slot (the Spaniard is world No1, Wimbledon and French Open champion and Olympic gold medal-winner after all) on the main show court. The decision was made because the TV chiefs were not sure enough Americans knew who Murray is to want to be glued to their sets at 11 in the morning.

“They [Nadal and Murray] are both professional, they both understood,” Brian Earley, the US Open referee, said. But whether they both liked it is something quite different. Federer will have had more than 24 hours to compose his thoughts before the final today (scheduled for 5pm local time 10pm BST), while whoever meets him there will have to come down from the high of their semi-final victory and turn their attention to stopping the Swiss from winning his fifth singles title here in succession.

Actually, it could be worse. It was only seven years ago that the championship stopped playing its men's semi-finals either side of the women's final, which clearly gave the winner of the first semi a distinct advantage. Or so the theory went.

John McEnroe was digging into his memory bank yesterday, recalling how, in his stellar year of 1984, he had defeated Jimmy Connors in the second semi-final that ended at 11.14pm. Much earlier in the day, Ivan Lendl, in a run of eight consecutive Open finals, saved a match point in defeating Pat Cash in a fifth set tie-break, to book his place in the final. “I felt terrible physically after beating Jimmy, but I remembered that Lendl looked worse than I did at the end of his match and that gave me a psychological boost,” McEnroe said. He went out and defeated Lendl for the loss of only eight games in the final.

Lendl was also prowling the corridors of Flushing Meadows yesterday. From reaching his first semi-final here, in 1982, he lost only twice before that stage again and, of his nine semi-final appearances, lost once, to Stefan Edberg, of Sweden, in 1991 (also in a fifth set tie-break). Whether he was asked to play in the first semi-final or the second, it mattered not a jot to him. “I knew that my physical conditioning was fine, so it came down to mental strength,” Lendl said. “It is the same for Murray and Nadal now. Which of them will have the mental strength to come through? It has always been tough here, but, hey, s*** happens. You just had to get on with it and give of your best.”

All the while, Federer has been sitting pretty. And yet, he seemed sure before the interruption to the Murray-Nadal match that a Monday final was a certainty. Asked how he would feel if he claimed what would be his only grand-slam tournament victory of the year, Federer said: “Give me 35 hours and we'll sit down with a drink and talk about it.” So how did Federer know during the Nadal-Murray semi-final that he would not be back on court until Monday evening? The Swiss are renowned for the precision of their clock-making, but that is ridiculously excellent timing.

McEnroe is overjoyed that Federer is in the final and so clearly elated at rediscovering his form. “We have talked about him being superhuman, but it's good to know that actually he is human after all,” the former champion said.