Anyone walking past a tennis player's locker room and hearing a series of screams, grunts and groans would normally be inclined to ignore it on the assumption that it was only Maria Sharapova rehearsing for her latest match. However, it now appears that it might actually be Lleyton Hewitt getting duffed up by one of his fellow professionals.

Hewitt appears aware of the possibility himself, given the amount of time he spends pumping iron in the gymnasium, though it's more a case of his pumping fists - along with guttural shouts of "C'mon!" at inappropriate moments - which is beginning to get up people's noses. Lleyton's fist-pump is pretty impressive, and it's by no means certain that he would come off second best in any changing room dust-up.

A couple of days ago, Brad Gilbert, Andre Agassi's former coach, said that Hewitt was in danger of getting punched on the nose in the locker room, which is clearly the way they settle things in Australia. After his third-round match with Juan Ignacio Chela, Hewitt's coach, Roger Rasheed, confronted the Argentine in the players' corridor and told him kindly to refrain from spitting at Lleyton, otherwise he'd "knock his ****ing block off".

Hewitt had already got under the skin of the mild-mannered American James Blake in his previous match, and while Chela's excuse that his stream of spittle just happened to be travelling in Hewitt's direction did not, so to speak, hold much water, it only cost him a fine that did not amount to much more than his tournament meal allowance. So maybe the authorities are as fed up with Hewitt as the players appear to be.

Yesterday's fourth-round match against the unseeded Majorcan teenager Rafael Nadal produced an even bigger quota than usual of over-the-top "C'mons", which was perhaps not surprising given that Hewitt came dangerously close to defeat before squeezing home in five sets, 7-5, 3-6, 1-6, 7-6, 6-2. And they were all aimed, as usual, at his yellow-shirted band of raucous followers, whose repertoire is so banal that a Martian spacecraft landing on the Rod Laver Arena would have quickly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth, and flown off somewhere else.

It is no great surprise that Hewitt spawns such a following, as Australia are the world No 1 seeds when it comes to air-headed patriotism, the United States included. Even an American journalist was startled during the Sydney Olympics when a train driver announced that good old Aussie had just won gold in the water polo and the entire carriage burst into a chorus of Waltzing Matilda.

Yesterday, as Hewitt strode on to court, the stadium reverberated to a frankly awful rendition of Advance Australia Fair, which may have had something to do with Hewitt immediately losing his serve. Like Don Bradman coming out for his last innings and being bowled for a second-ball duck, the poor lad would have been choked with emotion - either that or he was in tears at hearing his national anthem being butchered.

Hewitt and Nadal were clad from head to foot in identical colours, and the only way to tell them apart was that one was wearing his cap back to front and the other was wearing shorts that came down to his shins. They looked like a pair of Fred Perry's old trousers that had been badly shrunk in the laundry.

Fred, however, would not have covered the court quite like Nadal, who took Hewitt on at his own game of not giving up on a point unless the ball had gone into the second tier of the stand. It was like watching two golden retrievers at the seaside, never tiring of bringing back the master's stick, and for once Hewitt's legs were no match for his opponent's.

Hewitt was in full "C'mon!" mode when he sneaked the first set and then took a 2-0 lead in the second, but from that moment Nadal's amazing agility - and no little skill - won him 11 of the next 12 games, including nine on the trot, and five of six Hewitt service games. The Australian was so frustrated that he earned a code of conduct warning for pinging a ball on to the stadium roof, from where - had he not already won the point - Nadal would undoubtedly have attempted to retrieve it.

There was much "C'moning" from Hewitt during this period, though it would have been drowned out in any event by Nadal's grunting. If he and Sharapova ever get romantically attached and are booked into the honeymoon suite, you'd have to move hotels, never mind floors.

The game eventually turned on the fourth-set tiebreak, and when Nadal lost his serve early in the fifth, he sent for medical assistance. The umpire announced this to the crowd with the slightly curious statement: "Ladies and gentlemen, the trainer has been called to evaluate Mr Nadal." However, from the trouble the medic had getting his hands up Nadal's trousers to reach the top of his thigh, the situation did not so much require an evaluation from the trainer as a tailor.