Nadal defeated Federer in five sets in 4 hours and 23 minutes, with the match finishing after midnight, becoming the first Spaniard, male or female, to win the Australian Open.

The game lasted for ten minutes before Federer broke Nadal with a forehand winner to level the opening set at 1–1.

At 30–40, Federer hammered a return winner to break Nadal for the second time and gain a 4–2 lead.

With the serve not working, Federer engaged in aggressive baseline rallies to compete with Nadal, constantly putting him on the defensive.

Federer fought back to gain a fourth break point that Nadal saved with a drop shot.

The ball was clearly out but Federer used a strategic Hawkeye challenge on the call in an attempt to rattle Nadal.

[3][4] Federer went back to work quickly holding serve to begin the fourth set.

A backhand winner from Federer and an error from Nadal set up two break points in the next game.

Federer showed an outburst of emotion for allowing this to happen as he fired a ball into the advertising boards.

After a spat with the umpire, Federer saved the next break point with a backhand winner to get the game to deuce.

After Nadal's relentless onslaught on Federer's backhand for the better part of four hours, it finally broke down as the clock struck midnight in Melbourne.

[3][4] Federer served to stay in the match, but committed a double fault at 0–15 to put Nadal two points away from victory.

At deuce, a long rally saw Nadal create a third championship point with a backhand winner.

One last rally ensued that saw Federer run around his backhand three times to hit a forehand.

The match ended at 12:14 AM as Nadal fell to the court in disbelief that he had won the Australian Open.

Further, Federer had entered the match with an 8–0 record in hard court Grand Slam finals.

The loss saw Federer fall short of equaling both as his undefeated record in hard court Major finals came to an end.

The loss further brought about immediate doubt by some analysts who believed that Federer might never equal Sampras' record.

He also became the first man in the Open era to hold three Grand Slam titles on three different surfaces simultaneously, in addition to winning the Gold Medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

This also saw Nadal become the second man (after Djokovic) in the Open era to achieve a double Career Grand Slam, winning each of the majors at least twice in singles.

For years this was partially true in the sense that Federer won four majors since this final, but indeed had not beaten Nadal in three subsequent Grand Slam meetings.

[14] It would not be until the 2017 Australian Open that two would meet again in a Grand Slam final, that time ending in the 35-year-old Federer's five-set victory that claimed his 18th singles major and subsequently set new tennis records from it.

Until his 2017 Australian Open victory, Federer had not beaten Nadal in a Grand Slam since the 2007 Wimbledon final, and many analysts pointed to the 2009 Australian Open final as the match which severely compromised Federer's belief that he could win against Nadal in a major.

Mats Wilander proposed that Federer had developed a mental block while playing against Nadal and that their rivalry had become one-sided and predictable after this match.

Later in the year, however, Nadal would lose at the French Open for the first time when he lost to Robin Söderling in the fourth round.

[16] Söderling would eventually reach the final, before losing to Federer, who by winning the French Open for the first (and only) time completed his own Career Grand Slam and equalled Pete Sampras' then-record of 14 Major titles.

Nadal then received the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup and put his arm around Federer, encouraging him to take to the microphone again.

During his speech, Nadal further stated that Federer would recover from the loss to go on and break Sampras' record of fourteen Grand Slam titles in due time.

[20] Federer did exactly that at the following two Grand Slam tournaments, first equalling the record at the French Open[17] and then breaking it at Wimbledon by winning his fifteenth major.

[15] Nadal felt that surviving the third set and winning it in a tiebreaker was the pivotal point of the match.