I’d give anything to be seriously good at tennis. It’s the one game I can play with a small degree of skill, although a half-way decent topspin backhand is always top of my wish-list.  

So yesterday afternoon’s Men’s Final at Wimbledon was a treat beyond one’s dreams. Quite apart from the fact that their game was one of the most extraordinary sporting battles any of us has ever witnessed, what struck me was the grace of the pair of them as they slugged it out on Centre Court in the near-darkness, like a pair of punch-drunk middleweights (watched by 13m people on the BBC, apparently).

These days professional sportspeople are often a grim bunch. They frequently display vanity, greed, bad manners, and poor behaviour both on and off the field. Football is the worst culprit – and the ludicrous sums of money that have been pumped into the game have done nothing whatsoever to improve the characters of those who play it at the highest level. If you chuck £90,000-a-week at an ill-prepared and immature 18 year old, what do you expect?

By contrast, Federer and Nadal were a superb example: both utterly determined and possessed of barely credible levels of skill. When two truly great players both reach peaks at the same time, the result is a privilege to behold.  As Simon Barnes says in The Times, ‘At this ineffable level of sport, it’s time to pack away the superlatives and just give thanks for bloody sport; for these daft games we watch that produce such extraordinary things and bring us such extraordinary people.’

But what topped it off for me was the fact that, when the fifth set was won, you could see the pain that Nadal felt on toppling the man who has stood at the summit of the game for the last half decade like a Colossus.

It’s a message that shouldn’t be lost on business. Just because you are at the top of your game and have the world at your feet, a bit of humility and a touch of generosity of spirit does not go amiss.  

In today's bulletin:
MT celebrates young women in business
Family battle brewing at Anheuser-Busch
Rose facing thorny reception at M&S AGM
Editor's blog: Graceful collapse of a colossus
Tax: is simple better than stable?

I can’t say that I’m remotely surprised to hear that eBay has been fined nearly €40m by a French court. The online retailer was taken in front of the beaks by LVMH, the French luxury goods maker, because it’s heartily sick of eBay allowing fake perfumes and handbags to be sold on the site.

MT readers will know I’m a big eBay user. There’s nothing I love better of an evening than keeping one eye on a semi-dull telly programme while hunting down another Etro shirt online to add to my legendary collection. I’m such an expert that I can see a counterfeit Chinese Etro before it’s even downloaded  – there are several on there at the moment being punted by a dodgy bloke from Turkey. Like a good eBay citizen, I’ve already shopped the Istanbul-based villain.  

eBay is a perfect answer to the sustainability problems of the 21st century. Rather than march down to the shops to buy more new gear we don’t really need, thus using valuable energy, eBay helps recycle what is already out there gathering dust in cupboards and wardrobes. It is one of the most perfect uses of The Long Tail – I’ve bought shirts from Koreans in Texas and a small aluminium duck from a man in the Midlands.  Only yesterday I got a sun hat for my ten-month-old baby. OK, so it smelled mysteriously of curry, but the kid doesn’t mind and my green conscience is clear.

But eBay has got to do something about this problem – and bleating that LVMH is simply attempting to ‘protect uncompetitive practices at the expense of consumer choice’ isn’t good enough. (I can recall unwittingly buying a fake a few years back when I was a novice. I was so cross I didn’t use the site for weeks)

Sure, it won’t be easy to police the whole site to ensure the genuine nature of items – but it must show willing. LVMH has been harrumphing via its lawyers for ages about ‘parasitical practices'  (pratiques parasites, perhaps?); the truth is it hates seeing even genuine items from its collections on eBay, which it snootily regards as drecky and pour les proles...