Madison Keys – Ian Louis Harris

A Few Days In Eastbourne, Mostly For Tennis, 23 to 27 June 2026

Janie and I had enjoyed our time at Eastbourne so much in 2024…

A Few Days In Eastbourne, Mostly For The Tennis, 25 to 29 June 2024

…we decided to book the same three days of Eastbourne tennis for 2026: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Tuesday Evening

On the Tuesday evening, we met up with Linda Wrobel (formerly Linda Phillips) and her friend Yasmin for dinner. Yasmin was a very close friend of the late great Mark Phillips, Linda’s cousin. Linda and Yasmin became good friends in the wake of Mark’s illness and demise, nearly two years ago now.

Linda judged correctly that we would all enjoy each other’s company. Yasmin had been in town for the first couple of days of the Eastbourne tennis. Janie and I enquired about the comfort levels (or lack thereof) at Devonshire Park, given the unseasonal heatwave – the hottest June temperatures since records began.

Brutal, to be honest…

…said Yasmin. We wanted honesty, even though that answer wasn’t exactly what we wanted to hear.

We ate in the Thai restaurant in Sovereign Harbour. Same place as last time with Linda, but on this occasion, with the weather so hot, we ate in their outdoor harbour area which was a very pleasant temperature for evening dining.

It probably helped that England were playing a World Cup football match at the appointed hour – we could sit wherever we liked. Linda’s quite keen on football, but I sense that we didn’t miss much by missing that match.

Wednesday 24 June 2026 At Devonshire Park

We were on Centre Court, so we saw:

Jessica Bouzas Maneiro v Madison Keys

Jelena Ostapenko v Panna Udvardy

Felix Gill v Jan Choinski

Jack Draper v Jack Pinnington Jones

But we couldn’t sit in the sun for long periods – we normally wander quite a lot anyway – so we did a fair amount of shade-seeking walking around.

In so doing we found a shady spot in the walkway between Centre Court and Court Number One, where we caught glimpses of Toby Samuel and Arthur Fery playing their matches.

Toby – plucky but doomed to close matches with narrow defeats this grass season

Arthur Fery – remember where you saw him first.

We also spent a bit of time on Court Two – especially once there was a bit of breeze and shade on one side. There we saw a bit of:

McCartney Kessler v Anhelina Kalinina

Gabriel Diallo v Tomas Martin Etcheverry

Great view of Devonshire Park in all its glory from up there

Here’s a link to that day’s results.

We had a great day. And we were all set to come back and do some more tomorrow.

Thursday 25 June 2026 At Devonshire Park

Centre Court again, so we saw:

Kader Nouni in the umpire’s chair for one of our matches

Jelena Ostapenko v Zeynep Sonmez

McCartney Kessler v Madison Keys

Jack Draper v Gabriel Diallo

You can have too much of a good thing, so we decided to skip the fourth match on centre court and let our tickets be sold as charity returns for that match: Ugo Humbert v Quentin Halys.

Here’s the results sheet from this day.

Instead we enjoyed a quiet evening on the terrace of our lovely AirBnB in Pevensey Bay

Friday 26 June 2026 At Devonshire Park

Semi-finals day on Centre Court. We saw:

Tatjana Maria v Jelena Ostapenko
Petra Marcinko v Madison Keys
Zizou Bergs v Toby Samuel
Jack Draper v Ugo Humbert

It wasn’t quite so hot today and indeed we even had a little rain, briefly, after Tatjana Maria won the first set, which led to Jelena Ostapenko retiring.

During the retirement interval, I guessed that Jack Draper might have gone for his warm up and guessed correctly. Janie was well pleased as she had been hoping to see it.

Then another abbreviated match, as Petra Marcinko also retired after losing one set to Madison Keys:

Then an epic: Zizou Bergs v Toby Samuel:

Toby was doing great until we abandoned him, in order to have one last iced coffee and stretch our legs. It all went horribly wrong for wildcard Brit Toby while we were away.

Would Jack Draper fare any better against Ugo Humbert?

Oh well, never mind. We’d had a great time.

Here are the results from semi-finals day.

Homeward Bound – 27 June 2026

We left our lovely AirBnB quite early the next morning – but not early enough to avoid heavy traffic on the M25, followed by a sweltering afternoon & evening in London.

Still, we’d had a great time, so the journey for sure was worth it.

In the unlikely event that you want to see all the pictures – and there were plenty – click the Flickr link here or below:

Hot Stuff At The Queen’s Club, WTA Quarter-Finals Day, 13 June 2025

Feeling the heat

Squeezed between two days at Lord’s for the ICC World Test Championship final…and then another day at Lord’s for that final, I took a break from cricket at Lord’s by going to Queen’s for a day to watch tennis with Janie.

Friday 13 June turned out to be a very hot day indeed, which is potentially more problematic for us at Queen’s, where we had allocated seats in the sun, than at Lord’s, where I can pick and choose a bit more.

Still, we had a good time, not least because it was an excellent day of tennis.

This is the first time there has been a women’s tournament at this professional level since the early 1970s – i.e. a few months before I picked up a racket for the first time.

Anyway, more than fifty years after I lost my tennis virginity, we saw:

Madison Keys beat Diana Shnaider
Tatjana Maria beat Elena Rybakina
Qinwen Zheng beat Emma Raducanu
Amanda Anisimova beat Emma Navarro

I took one stroll mid match during the first match and checked out the facilities.

One of the “benefits” of a day at Queen’s rather than Lord’s is that I don’t expect to run into a cricketing colleague, friend or acquaintance every five yards or so. Yet, on leaving the Arena at Queen’s, within about five yards, I ran into Josh Knappett, who is my main Middlesex CC link in my capacity as Middlesex’s Trustee on the London Cricket Trust. Josh was even sporting an MCC hat. Always a pleasure to see Josh, of course, but it made both me and Janie laugh when I reported back to her on this chance encounter.

Less amusing was the heat and the crowds as we all left the arena at the end of the first match. I did suggest that we turn right rather than left on exit, but Janie spotted a “toilets” sign and got us caught up in heaving dead end misery at the club house end of the campus, where a fight nearly broke out (not us, I hasten to add). Some folk (again, not us) tank up with alcohol to add to the strain of the heat on such days.

Anyway, we changed tack and ended up at the less-heaving end of the campus, where we observed some fine players practicing and took some delicious iced coffee to cool ourselves down.

Above, Neal Skupski, below, Joe Salisbury

We took advantage of some shade and air conditioning at the exhibition stand end of the ground before returning to see the end of the Maria v Rybakina match.

Above, Elena Rybakina, below, Tatjana Maria

Our smoked trout bagels (lovingly prepared by me in the morning before I went to the physiotherapist and the gym) were not going to eat themselves. I can faithfully report that they indeed did not eat themselves; we ate them. We also ate some hand-made crisps, cheese clouds pretzel thins, strawberries and grapes. Not all at once – throughout the afternoon and early evening.

Next up Qinwen Zheng (who now prefers to be known as Zheng Qinwen apparently) against Emma Raducanu.

We took a break during that match, for comfort and for a game of table tennis in the sponsors exhibition area. My new found stability and confidence transferred to table tennis, where I recorded a rare win over Janie.

Janie’s rage almost certainly knew no bounds at this juncture, but she did a grand job of behaving as if she was having a good time and cared not about the table tennis result.

Soon after our return to our seats, the penultimate match ended and the last match of the day began.

Above, Emma Navarro, below, Amanda Anisimova

After the first set, Janie looked up and said that her internal weather detector sensed rain approaching. Strangely, AccuWeather agreed, suggesting that we had some 40 minutes or so before the rain would start.

We decided, wisely I think, to leg it at that juncture, avoiding the heave at the gates and getting home in time to catch the end of the last match on the telly.

We’d had a grand day out.

A Few Days In Eastbourne, Mostly For The Tennis, 25 to 29 June 2024

Leylah, you’ve got me on my knees…

Janie and I had enjoyed our time at Eastbourne so much in 2023…

A Short Break In Eastbourne, Mostly For The International Tennis Tournament, 25 to 28 June 2023

…we decided to book three days of Eastbourne tennis for 2024: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Tuesday Evening

On the Tuesday evening we met Linda Wrobel (formerly Linda Phillips) for dinner. Linda lives in Bexhill, which, me being a died-in-the-wool Londoner, seemed to me to have no proximity whatsoever to Eastbourne. But last year, when I posted about our Eastbourne trip on Facebook, Linda messaged me wondering what the hell Janie and I were doing in Eastbourne without contacting and meeting Linda!

Linda first came to our Airbnb to have a look around, then we wandered round to the same Thai place that Janie and I had tried the previous year.

So deep in conversation were we, that we completely forgot top take pictures of each other or of the food. Here is a picture of Janie with the food from the previous year.

It was a very enjoyable evening with Linda.

After that, three days of tennis and picnics.

We took an infeasible number of photographs on those three days, which could do with some editing into a highlights album. If you like canonical, the 200 or so pictures are in the following album:

Wednesday

On the Wednesday we saw:

Sebastian Baez v Miomir Kecmanovic
Jelena Ostapenko v Katie Boulter;
Emma Raducanu v Jessica Pegula;
Taylor Fritz v Thiago Seyboth Wild (actually we just watched the first five games of that last one).

Here are some sample pictures from the Wednesday:

It was a very hot day, that Wednesday, hence the iced coffees quite early in the day.

Thursday

On the Thursday we saw:

Flavio Cobolli v Billy Harris,
Jasmine Paolini v Katie Boulter,
Daria Kasatkina v Emma Raducanu,
Taylor Fritz v Juncheng Shang (again we just watched the first five games of that last one).

Cooler and breezier, it was, on the Thursday and the Friday.