More by luck than judgment, I chose a really good day, the Tuesday, for a pair of seats at The Queen’s Club to see some lawn tennis. It was fine weather and mostly excellent tennis too.
Janie and I have spent the day watching tennis at Queen’s before, just a few months before lockdown, but that was “realers”, not “lawners”.
We had also, back in the day, popped in to see a couple of late afternoon matches after work. But that’s not the same thing as a proper day at the tennis.
Only a 25% crowd was allowed and centre court was the only court with seating. If you chose to wander around you might be forgiven for thinking that you were at Queen’s the day before the tournament – the walkways around the practice courts etc were so quiet.
But we were mostly there for the tennis proper . First up was Matteo Berrettini against Stefano Travaglia. Queen’s was a very Italian affair this year for some reason. That match – depicted in the headline picture, was a close run thing given that Berrettini is the top seed and Travaglia…isn’t.
Next up was Britain’s Dan Evans v Alexei Popyrin, the latter being an Australian with a Russian name.
We chose to stretch our legs at the start of that match, as the Berrettini match had been quite long. While walking around the practice courts, we spotted Herbert and Mahut practicing against each other rather than with each other:
Then back to Centre Court. The small crowd ever so politely took Dan Evans’s side, but with barely a yelp, to be honest, just louder polite applause. It was good to see him play so well.
I had taken responsibility for the picnic, which we went through at a gentle pace throughout the day. Beef and horseradish submarine rolls, Lincolnshire Poacher ciabatta rolls, mixed nuts, grapes, strawberries, two types of smoothie…
…we took some of the food home with us and had a mini-picnic in the evening with the leftovers.
Meanwhile, after the Evans match, the big event was the return of Andy Murray to main tour play after a long interval. At this point there were elements of the crowd that got really quite excited.
Murray was up against Benoît Paire, a French player whose beard has become unfeasibly large over the years.
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard.
After Murray dispensed with Paire, I took a solo leg stretch, snapping one or two more stars along the way on the practice courts:
The last match of the day was less interesting to us; Denis Shapovalov v Aleksandar Vukic.
Both big servers, it became fairly obvious during set two that the match was likely to go to two tie-breaks which would likely go the way of Shapovalov, so we left a little early and indeed missed precisely that.
It really was a super day. The standard of stewarding, mostly young women, was very high – the atmosphere much calmer than usual but all the more charming for that.
Janie was super happy, to use a phrase that every tennis player seems bound to use these days.