Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic's Miami 2011 Postmortem

The dust has barely settled at the Miami Sony Ericsson Open 2011, but already there is an air of novelty about the tennis world.

Whether it was the way things had gone throughout the tournament for the Big Three, (Federer, Nadal and Djokovic) or simply the way the final match was played, we will no doubt look back on this tournament as a highly significant moment in this season.

Sure, nothing will ever compare to the slams, and Miami will never compare to Wimbledon or the French, but the biggest scalps are earned through smaller ones, and Djokovic's win here can only be said to have been the culmination—indeed his fourth straight title this year—of many many scalps this year.

To be exact, it has been 24 scalps, some larger than others, but perhaps none so important as five—his three wins against Federer, and now two against Rafael Nadal.

Who's going to deny it? The biggest stories coming out of this tournament were the most expected.

Is Federer on the decline? Everyone is asking; more urgently, however, people wonder: Is Rafa on the decline, too? Is Djokovic really the new deal in tennis?

These are almost imponderable questions—to attempt to answer them would be speculative and ridiculously inadequate.

If there was one thing that Miami confirmed for the Big Three, however, it was the new dominance of what one might name the "knockout" style of baseline tennis—a pugilistic, war to the death mentality, in both aggressive and defensive terms.

The men's final was simply stunning, on a performance and visceral level.

Much like so many of their previous clashes, this one was epic, and exhausting.

Djokovic, who had demolished all his opposition, finally found in his way a human wall that gave him the match he had been in search of for almost three months.

Yes, they had just played last week, but this was by far a more intense encounter.

Grunts, or rather combative, strained war cries seemed to punctuate every strike.

This was by far a most pugnacious affair, to the end, when Djokovic set up match point off a killer forehand winner, which had finally ended a gruelling cross court battle.

There were a lot of cross court battles on Sunday—in fact, mini strategic wars all across the court, it seemed.

It was the culmination of the all-court tennis revolution that had been pioneered by Federer, and now realised in its rawest, most brutally un-poetic form.

For Federer, Miami only heralded, or rather confirmed, some of the fears of tennis fans, and perhaps fears within Federer himself—he is no longer, by any stretch, the world number one force that he once was.

Of course, this is repetitive of things that have been said almost daily for the last three years—one couldn't help but think, after all, that Federer had somehow managed to deceive us into believing the untouchability of his game even in the last year or two. Clearly, however, he was outmatched in the semifinals.

As badly as he played, he just failed to find all the gears—maybe, at last, he has lost them.

The cogwheels of genius brought him little relief that Friday, only nagging brain rot, and indecision. It was a fine, tragic scene.

Art, and the beauty of tennis with which his game had become synonymous over the last few years, found no champion that day—instead, it was thrashed, and whipped senseless, by the militant lassos of Rafael Nadal.

Maybe tennis would do with a new definition of the beautiful.

Federer has only signified that classic beauty, the grace and simplicity of tennis as it should be.

What Nadal and Djokovic have done in the last three weeks, however, and especially here at Miami, is to have shown what tennis can be like. Perhaps, even what it should be.

It is a primeval battle between warriors with rackets—why not the blood-curdling war-grunts? Nadal and Djokovic have proclaimed a new era in tennis—the Age of the Loud.

They are two emotive men, as much as Federer had often been too reserved.

Might we speak of a new era of Nadal and Djokovic? It doesn't quite have the rhyme that Federer and Nadal have brought to the lips for six years, but it is certainly clunky and violent enough.

Too long we have seen a synergy, a harmony, in the epic clashes between the Swiss and the Spaniard. On Friday, and much more so on Sunday, however, there were intimations of a new order—one of cacophony, and disharmony.