Two topics of conversation suffused London yesterday. Where are you watching? And what’s going to happen? It could be heard in the most improbable offices and eating houses. Known workaholics looked at their watches and slipped quietly from their desks to catch an early train.
One enclave dared to be immune. The All England Lawn Tennis Club tried to pretend it was not happening. At 7pm, inquirers were frostily informed, the screen on Henman Hill would be showing tennis not football. Who were these muddied oafs anyway? And how dare they presume to represent a country that has suddenly gone short of mud.
Wimbledon has long had a tortured relationship with international soccer tournaments. Every second year one of them sprawls across the only significant fortnight devoted to tennis.
But something happened in 1996, when England staged the European Championship, the very year – the very fortnight – when England’s 30 years of footballing hurt achieved its first extension after one Gareth Southgate missed a penalty against Germany. Another, rather similarly young sportsman, also personable but fated, made his first impression on Wimbledon: Timothy Henry Henman.
It may be hard now to recall what a joke British tennis was before that. The huzzahs that greeted Jeremy Bates when he actually survived into the second week! How one British female No1 was described as playing like a traffic cone!
But with the shortest of gaps, Henman came, saw and occasionally threatened to conquer. And then he morphed into Andy Murray. Whereupon the annual psychodrama that preceded Henman’s heroic but doomed assaults on the Wimbledon title became even more compelling and not necessarily doomed.
Meanwhile England’s footballers became the joke. So much so that shortly before Murray’s first triumph, the St George’s flags disappeared completely. Anyone who had dealings with the useless Lawn Tennis Association could confirm that its seriousness was only as strong as one Scotsman’s physique. But no wonder tennis felt huffy yesterday: it sensed that everything was turning round and Wimbledon would once more become merely a feat of British organisation and history and hospitality, not a showcase for the nation’s own tennis.
As of old, only one male British competitor was still standing on Tuesday night . And no one was giving him much hope of being there a week on Sunday. Kyle Edmund is officially the British No1 but that is a term used with the implicit inverted commas with which people describe Theresa May as prime minister.
Edmund’s first-round match, against an Australian qualifier, Alex Bolt, took place on No1 Court, which is a bit of a cockpit nowadays, just right for making a foreigner feel uncomfortable. Now Edmund is a strong young man: an athletic, effective and occasionally inventive player, with a strong run in the Australian Open behind him. But there was nothing to remind one of Prince Tim and King Andy’s golden days.
Here was the young pretender, even paler than the dress code decrees: straw-coloured hair hidden under his white cap and no other hint of colour other than his Nike swooshes. It was a bloodless encounter too. And the crowd seemed curiously detached for a match involving a British No1. The only c’mons audible in the first set were Aussie-accented cries of “C’mon Bolty”, which sounded as though they indicated annoyance at slow service in a curry house.
Interest perked up only when Edmund followed two straightforward sets by going a break down in the third. Now the “C’mon Kyles” began to come, though they were interspersed with the odd “C’mon Andy”. Murray would visibly bridle when anyone gave him the same treatment by C’mon Tim-ming him in the early days. Edmund registered no emotion.
But he did fight back to win the set. And afterwards he said he was pleased to finish in time to get back to base, get some treatment and watch the footy. “I’m really pumped to support,” he added. He seemed a uncomplicated lad. I fear he will never quite provide any of the theatricals provided by the other two: Henman, whose nebbishness somehow brought the mothering instinct in everyone, male or female; and Murray, for whom every point, every routine forehand, seemed like a shot fired in some unending one-man battle.
By kick-off in Moscow Edmund was presumably long gone. But over on Centre a British qualifier, Katy Dunne, was struggling to stay in the contest against the seeded Latvian, Jelena Ostapenko. Home advantage? The beating heart of world tennis was 90 per cent empty and Dunne had to cope with an atmosphere slightly less intense than she might have experienced playing mixed doubles in Hemel Hempstead.
I have never seen the place so deserted during the fortnight, even back in the old days when it rained. “Anything else on?” I asked a steward. “Yes,” he said gloomily. “Wish I was there.”
Henman Hill had been subdued all day. Around teatime, when Simona Halep was on the big screen, they were split between the sleepers, eaters, drinkers and texters with a tiny Lib Dem poll rating-sized cohort watching the tennis. Now Djokovic was on screen. There was no concession to the football. But there were many empty spaces here too. At the end of yet another God-given summer’s day, the kind of day when people habitually say they would adore being at Wimbledon, many of those who actually were had voted with their feet and taken the Edmund route.
A good few of those who remained on the hill were making the best of things and trying to watch football on tiny screens. “Wish you were home?” I asked one of them. He looked at his female companion and shook his head loyally. Then he echoed the steward. “Wish I was there,” he whispered.
