On Saturday, the tennis blues took the District Line down to SW19 and the home of tennis, Wimbledon. As the great green megalith that is centre court swung into view round a bend in Church Road, I was reminded of all that is good and bad about British tennis. En route to gate five, I peered through the railings at the statue of Fred Perry, the last British man to win Wimbledon in 1936. He looks isolated alone on his plinth, flanked by plate glass. Nevertheless, the hum of construction work fills the air of a club that is as modern as it is conscious of its own history. The newly-built sunken court two is a worthy amphitheatre to the gladiators of our sport, the famous ‘graveyard of champions’ has been replaced by a new court three and a set of ‘grow lights’ over centre court ensures that the grass is always green, regardless of the British weather.

The timetable had listed ’11:30 – Brunch’. In my mind, this conjured an image of bacon and egg sloshed down by coffee, a short pit-stop before we hit the courts. But here they don’t do things by halves. When we trooped into the summer tea-room that overlooks the first row of grass courts, we were presented with a slab of salmon and told to help ourselves to couscous, pesto’d tomatoes, zadziki and seedy bread. It was like no brunch I had ever eaten. It seemed rude to refuse a desert at ten past twelve, and so I proceeded to demolish a tangy lemon tart accompanied by a Cruella-Deville style chocolate twirl. Heaven. Weighed down with delicious ballast, we made our way to the indoor hard courts.

As we warmed up on the stick ‘HarTru’, it soon became obvious that we would somehow need to excuse our impending defeat. Across the net, Ross Mathewson stroked the ball effortlessly down the line; he would later casually let it drop that ‘When I was playing Monte Carlo…’. Next to him hustled Gary Henderson, a multiple Yorkshire champion who reached a career high ranking of 237 in the world in 1994 and played Guy Forget in the first round of Wimbledon in 1995. The fact that his career earnings amounted to only $26,000 proves what a brutal world the ATP tour is. Gary’s whip-crack serve and the pair’s secure volleying put them in an indomitable position, and Nick and I never recovered, losing 6-1, 6-2. The same story recurred in our next two matches. Endowed with greater natural talent and tactical nous, our opponents were happy to play within themselves, while we teetered too often on the divide between audacity and recklessness.

After performing my ablutions in a six-foot long bath, we were again treated to great tranches of cake, sandwiches, and scones with jam and clotted cream. A pint of beer later, we stole off into the foyer where players are interviewed before stepping out onto centre court and stood under the quote from that most quintessentially English poet, Rudyard Kipling: ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same’. A close examination of the men’s trophy revealed that Nadal is currently the ‘single handed champion of the world’. The only hitch is he’s not single handed.