Wimbledon at its weekend best

 Wimbledon at its weekend best.

It was yesterday at Wimbledon and SW19 was at its tea time smartest, Wimbledon in all of  its most handsome regalia and finery. The All England Lawn Tennis Club always likes to wear its most appropriate Sunday best, dinner jacket, shirt and club tie clean as a whistle and as fashionably elegant as has always been the case. It always observes centuries of royal etiquette and the most polite protocol. 

Yesterday evening, one of our last British hopes Cameron Norrie emerged exhausted but exhilarated after one of the most cliff hanging, gripping and most spectacular of five set battles with Nicolas Jarry. His Chilean opponent looked so shocked and upset after losing that, for a moment, you felt sure that he would throw his toys out of the proverbial pram and descend into childish petulance. It would not be pleasant or edifying viewing and, privately, Jarry must have known he'd become the pantomime villain such were the boos and opprobrium raining down on his ears at the end of this pulsating match. 

Jarry was at war with the world because he just couldn't come to terms with Norrie's complete and accomplished all round game, a fusion of the sublime and often miraculous. It's so good to see another British tennis prospect for the future, learning the ropes of the game and quietly progressing through this year's Wimbledon. Realistically, Norrie won't be at Wimbledon next Sunday afternoon, lifting the Wimbledon men singles trophy but you have to hand it to him. He'll be busting every gut, stretching every sinew and charging at return of serves with all the might he can possibly muster. 

Throughout the afternoon, Norrie had gone to toe to toe with Jarry losing a set and then throwing his racket at everything the Chilean had to offer. His whipped forehands were swung purposefully wide of Jarry and were frequently impossible to return. Then he slung his racket with almost wild abandon as if his life depended on this one match. There were the cultured and deceitful, sliced forehands and backhands from ridiculous positions on Centre Court, those beautifully executed drop shots that had Jarry gasping for oxygen and there was an extraordinary stamina and athleticism about Norrie that Jarry couldn't live with. 

Then Norrie released his artillery; there were drilled shots with just the right amount of power and weight of shot. The new British kid on the block had the Wimbledon crowd in raptures of delight. Norrie kept shifting his opponent from one end of the court to the other, dinking the ball over the net craftily with a delicious shrewdness and hitting the ball so firmly at Jarry that the Chilean had no answer to the Brit's questions. 

At the end, Norrie beat Jarry 6-3, 7-6, 6-7, 6-7, 6-3 after breaking twice in tie breaks. This was a throwback to the days when the likes of Andy Murray and even Roger Taylor would hurl their bodies whole heartedly at every shot imaginable, lunging at the ball and darting around the baselines with wholesome courage and bravado. Norrie isn't quite there yet but he isn't that far from being the finished article. The way Norrie dug in and summoned physical resources that even he must have thought he'd never find, was a testament to both his stamina and longevity. And so a furious and incensed Nicolas Jarry stormed off Centre Court as if somebody had taken his marbles away and told him to go to bed immediately. It had been a gross miscarriage of justice and Jarry was going to sulk and sneer. 

Meanwhile earlier on, Wimbledon witnessed one of the most heartbreakingly one sided of all matches. In hindsight, Pedro Martine should simply have turned over in the morning and gone right back to sleep. He needn't have bothered and his contest with the Italian Jannick Sinner turned into a freak show. Martine was clearly in trouble with his shoulder and that much had become readily apparent. The Spaniard, as became increasingly evident, could hardly hold a racket let alone hit a tennis ball. 

From the first set onwards, Martine laboured and toiled, his first serves reminiscent of a club player at a local municipal park. At one point, it looked as if the Spaniard was simply wishing that he could do anything but play at Wimbledon. He served at barely 70mph and his first serve was just a meek apology for what should have been a lethal missile that simply exploded on Corrie's baseline and past him in a flash. 

And so we continued to watch Jannick Sinner in no more than first gear because if he'd put his foot down on the accelerator, the match may have been over much sooner than it should have been. Sinner was a model of arrogance and princely authority, timing his shots with impeccable technique, forehands, slices, dreamy backhand returns, lightning fast reflexes and the occasional moment of improvisation when the ball was returned through his legs. Sinner had seen that his opponent was hampered with injury but just did what was required of him in such extenuating circumstances.

The moody looking Italian was now cruising past his Spanish opponent as if he were simply a helpless rag doll, driving all of his shots with menace and then lethal potency down the centre of the court. Sinner was here, there and everywhere, obviously in command and just waiting for the right moment to blast Martine into the obscurity of tennis history. Nobody remembers the losers at Wimbledon and Martine was no exception to the rule.  One day his day will come or maybe it won't but yesterday Sinner was at his most domineering and authoritative. 

When a medical break had been called to help in Martine's recovery from an extremely painful shoulder, the writing was on the wall. But of course that's a tiresome cliche but somehow a fitting reminder of sporting vulnerability and that must be even harder to bear. So it was Sinner romped home emphatically in the fifth deciding set 6-3. But your heart had to go out to Sinner's defeated warrior, still holding his shoulder and rubbing it vigorously.

There are times when sport just isn't fair, when everything goes wrong on the day but at Wimbledon, this was not the Sunday a certain Spanish gentleman must have been bargaining on. You know what's it like. You get up in the morning, stretching and yawning before your legs, arms, feet and the rest of the body aren't in a particularly co-operative mood. For Pedro Martine, Wimbledon will have to wait for another year. Somehow Martine had earned nothing but our deepest sympathy.