Victoria Luiza Barros & Nauhany Vitoria Leme Da Silva of Brazil, having just defeated Maria Valentina Pop & Anita Tu
We had a super day at Wimbledon again this year.
Again a quarter finals day, again our base court was Court One.
The weather was blisteringly hot. But we braved the relentless sunshine for quite some time ahead of our main features of the day. We chose Court 18, where the upper seating at least was getting a little breeze, albeit warm breeze. The stewards up there are charming and helpful.
As One O’Clock approached and the heat was getting stronger, we retreated to Court One where, joy oh joy, we discovered that the seats I had “chosen” were in the shade. Superb “planning” on my part.
Spoilt brats that we are…
…we were a little disappointed to be seeing Alexander Zverev against Taylor Fritz, as we were there for their five set epic on Centre Court a couple of years ago…
…so sort-of felt that we had previously done all that.
We stuck around for a while, then went out to get a sense of the atmosphere around the ground – Arthur Fery of Britain, the surprise package of this year’s Wimbledon, was making even more surprising light work of Flavio Cobolli on Centre Court – the sound from the Mound and that court was wonderful to hear around the grounds.
I also had a secret mission to visit Robert Allan Fitzgerald’s tennis racket in the Wimbledon museum – on loan from the MCC museum…
…although the Wimbledon Museum is describing it as Prince Albert’s tennis racket, suggesting that Bertie (Prince of Wales) presented it to the MCC after he became patron of the MCC at Fitz’s behest, rather than Prince Albert gifting it to Fitz at some earlier stage. Another historical detail that needs disambiguating; the Wimbledon version seems more likely given the minimal contact Prince Albert might have had with Fitz personally.
By the time we moved on, the results of both of the men’s quarter finals were all-but determined, so we thought we’d spend more time watching some of the promising youngsters.
We headed for Court 12, which was very sparsely populated at that stage, due to the sun and the main matches still being in play. We caught the very end of one girls doubles (see headline photo) and then took sanctuary in a corner where we could tell that the shade would arrive first and where you could tactically watch the Court 8 goings on while waiting for the next Court 12 match to start.
That doubles match went to a 10 point tie-break which got well up into the teens-all until it was finally determined by a lucky/bitterly unlucky net-chord unreturnable serve. Note to World Tennis and all the governing bodies – please abandon this “no lets” experiment and don’t let it seep into the adult game. It presents an element of unnecessary luck and simply adds to the inherent advantage of serving. I welcome experimentation but would welcome even more dispensing with this particular idea, which has been tried before, between 1875 and 1882, then sensibly replaced with the “let” rule.
Rant over.
We didn’t see that last game through to its end – we thought the crowds had died down enough once the first set was done and set off for home, very satisfied and happy.
Here is a link to the order of play for that day.
And here is a link to all the photos:
