lookeylikey slash headline of the day

Is it just me who has trouble parsing this headline I saw the other day?

OK, so let's start at the beginning: "I'm a Wimbledon champion marrying fan" - well, OK so you're a fan; I might have hyphenated "Wimbledon champion-marrying" or even "Wimbledon-champion-marrying" just to make it clearer, but let's carry on ... wait, now the rest of the sentence doesn't make sense.

Back up all the way to the beginning and it becomes clear that the starting "I'm" relates to "champion" rather than "fan", and that it was the fan who stopped the champion for a selfie. It didn't help that I initially read "help run tennis" as "help ruin tennis", but that's the fault of my appalling age-related vision deterioration, not the headline writers. 

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that assuming "fan" to be the subject of the first line is the more natural reading. It would really only have taken the addition of an "a" before "fan" to flip the default reading around, though. I'm not sure whether this is more properly classified as a garden-path sentence or a noun pile-up, or maybe even a crash blossom.

Anyway, the actual story relates to 2017 Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza, the only player to defeat each of the Williams sisters in Grand Slam finals, and, and I hesitate to say this these days for fear of being LITERALLY CANCELLED, possessor of a very lovely pair of legs. The guy she was accosted by for a selfie in New York just happens to be a top model who was working for Tom Ford at the time, just in case you want to calculate your chances of being able to successfully pull off a similar manoeuvre on the top tennis star of your choice without getting your ass tased and ending up with an ASBO.

Impossible to comment on women's tennis in any way without sounding like a colossal sex pervert. #Wimbledon2014

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 28, 2014

Anyway. it also struck me while looking through some photos of Muguruza for, hem hem, "research purposes" that she looks a bit like Imogen Heap, who I see I used the phrase "strange equine beauty" in connection with here, and also compared with Ronni Ancona. I actually think the Muguruza-Heap resemblance is closer, but I include all three anyway; make up your own mind.

the federer bureau of investigation

A couple of thoughts after watching a bit of the men's Australian Open tennis final the other day. Firstly, I should lay my cards on the table and say that I'm delighted that Roger Federer won, as I'm a big fan and I'd like to see him stay ahead of Rafael Nadal at the head of the overall list of Grand Slam singles title winners. I have no beef with Nadal, I should add, as he is wholly admirable and gives every indication of being a lovely bloke, but it seems right to me that Federer, the best all-round tennis player I've ever seen (not that I am any kind of expert) stays at the top of the list. Even the most ardent admirer of Nadal, and there are many (including a substantial contingent of The Ladies, if you know what I mean, and doubtless a few of The Guys too), would have to admit his tennis is a bit more based on power, supreme fitness and bloody-minded persistence and perhaps doesn't have the aesthetic grace and finesse of Federer's. Plenty of overused clichés are available:  the open-topped sportscar versus the Sherman tank, the rapier versus the broadsword, the sgian-dubh versus the shillelagh, if you want something a bit more Brit-centric.

Another reason is that despite both players having achieved the career Grand Slam, Nadal's Grand Slam singles record looks a bit more uneven than Federer's as it's more skewed towards the tournament he's won the most, the French Open. Ten out of his sixteen titles were won here, compared with eight out of Federer's twenty being at Wimbledon. So it occurred to me to wonder: what if we built a list of Grand Slam winners ordered by how many singles titles they'd won that were not at their favourite event? The idea is that this would be some crude measure of their versatility across different tournaments, different surfaces, different times of year, all that stuff. So here's the starting list (shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia): everyone who's won more than five Grand Slam men's singles titles.

Player	Total	Australian Open	French Open	Wimbledon	US Open
Roger Federer	20	6	1	8	5
Rafael Nadal	16	1	10	2	3
Pete Sampras	14	2	0	7	5
Roy Emerson	12	6	2	2	2
Novak Djokovic	12	6	1	3	2
Rod Laver	11	3	2	4	2
Björn Borg	11	0	6	5	0
Bill Tilden	10	0	0	3	7
Fred Perry	8	1	1	3	3
Ken Rosewall	8	4	2	0	2
Jimmy Connors	8	1	0	2	5
Ivan Lendl	8	2	3	0	3
Andre Agassi	8	4	1	1	2
Richard Sears	7	0	0	0	7
William Renshaw	7	0	0	7	0
William Larned	7	0	0	0	7
René Lacoste	7	0	3	2	2
Henri Cochet	7	0	4	2	1
John Newcombe	7	2	0	3	2
John McEnroe	7	0	0	3	4
Mats Wilander	7	3	3	0	1
Laurence Doherty	6	0	0	5	1
Tony Wilding	6	2	0	4	0
Jack Crawford	6	4	1	1	0
Don Budge	6	1	1	2	2
Stefan Edberg	6	2	0	2	2
Boris Becker	6	2	0	3	1
Frank Sedgman	5	2	0	1	2
Tony Trabert	5	0	2	1	2

And here's the re-ordered list if you exclude the one they won the most:

Player	Favourite tournament	Number of titles	Corrected number
Roger Federer	Wimbledon	8	12
Pete Sampras	Wimbledon	7	7
Rod Laver	Wimbledon	4	7
Rafael Nadal	French Open	10	6
Novak Djokovic	Australian Open	6	6
Roy Emerson	Australian Open	6	6
Björn Borg	French Open	6	5
Fred Perry	Wim / US	3	5
Ivan Lendl	French / US	3	5
Andre Agassi	Australian Open	4	4
Ken Rosewall	Australian Open	4	4
John Newcombe	Wimbledon	3	4
Mats Wilander	Aus / French	3	4
René Lacoste	French Open	3	4
Don Budge	Wim / US	2	4
Stefan Edberg	Aus / Wim / US	2	4
Bill Tilden	US Open	7	3
Jimmy Connors	US Open	5	3
Henri Cochet	French Open	4	3
John McEnroe	US Open	4	3
Boris Becker	Wimbldeon	3	3
Frank Sedgman	Aus / US	2	3
Tony Trabert	French / US	2	3
Jack Crawford	Australian Open	4	2
Tony Wilding	Wimbledon	4	2
Laurence Doherty	Wimbledon	5	1
Richard Sears	US Open	7	0
William Larned	US Open	7	0
William Renshaw	Wimbledon	7	0

Obviously this is very satisfying to me as it places Federer head and shoulders above the others. It also shunts a lot of the oldsters down to the bottom of the list as back in the day travelling from your home country to other parts of the world was a ridiculously time-consuming undertaking and so a lot of people didn't bother. So Bill Tilden drops from 10 to 3 and the serious one-tournament wonders like Sears, Larned, and Renshaw drop to zero. It's harsh, but fair. Let's try another formula - multiply everything together! Hang on, though, anyone who hasn't done the career Grand Slam will get a product of zero; we'd better add one to everything first, just to be fair. So someone who's won all the Grand Slams once will get a Grand Slam Factor or GSF of 16, whereas someone who's won one of them four times will end up with a GSF of 5. That sounds about right; consistency and versatility is what we're trying to reward here.

Player	Total	Aus	French	Wim	US	GSF
Roger Federer	20	6	1	8	5	756
Rafael Nadal	16	1	10	2	3	264
Roy Emerson	12	6	2	2	2	189
Rod Laver	11	3	2	4	2	180
Novak Djokovic	12	6	1	3	2	168
Pete Sampras	14	2	0	7	5	144
Fred Perry	8	1	1	3	3	64
Andre Agassi	8	4	1	1	2	60
Ivan Lendl	8	2	3	0	3	48
Ken Rosewall	8	4	2	0	2	45
Björn Borg	11	0	6	5	0	42
Jimmy Connors	8	1	0	2	5	36
René Lacoste	7	0	3	2	2	36
John Newcombe	7	2	0	3	2	36
Don Budge	6	1	1	2	2	36
Bill Tilden	10	0	0	3	7	32
Mats Wilander	7	3	3	0	1	32
Henri Cochet	7	0	4	2	1	30
Stefan Edberg	6	2	0	2	2	27
Boris Becker	6	2	0	3	1	24
John McEnroe	7	0	0	3	4	20
Jack Crawford	6	4	1	1	0	20
Frank Sedgman	5	2	0	1	2	18
Tony Trabert	5	0	2	1	2	18
Tony Wilding	6	2	0	4	0	15
Laurence Doherty	6	0	0	5	1	12
Richard Sears	7	0	0	0	7	8
William Renshaw	7	0	0	7	0	8
William Larned	7	0	0	0	7	8

The biggest casualties are the two-Slam wonders Borg and Tilden, while the consistent three-Slam guys like Rosewall and Lendl get a leg-up. Once again the oldsters get shunted to the bottom of the list, but, I mean, come on, guys, make an effort - if you can't be bothered to live in the right era of history with high-speed travel and communications, not to mention sports psychologists and Lucozade, then I've no sympathy for you.

That said, I expect if you come up with some suitably contorted formula you can probably work your guy to the top of the list. There's a challenge for all you Laurence Doherty fans out there.

stop that racket

So, Wimbledon, belatedly. Actually, if I can just get you to imagine some sort of summary/analysis thing complete with plaudits for Andy Murray (who I think is wholly admirable, just in case this all sounds a bit grudging) here then that'll save me actually having to write it.

Let's go off on a tangent instead. Now it used to be said that Wimbledon and the French Open were the two niche, "specialist" events on the Grand Slam calendar (the other two, now that they've settled down into being hard-court events, providing the level playing-field) - the French favouring the relentless baseline sluggers and Wimbers favouring the serve-volley merchants. As it happens if there's one thing that the recent success of Murray, Djokovic and Nadal (and even Roger Federer) at Wimbledon proves, it's that this is really no longer true, and that these days Wimbledon is a sort of quirky sub-division of the hard court season. Look back at the list of winners and you'll see that the last "proper" serve-volleyer to win the Wimbledon men's singles was Goran Ivanisevic in 2001. Nonetheless I felt obliged to do the research and find out what the stats say is the most "specialist" event of the four. The way I translate that is: here's a list of all the winners of each of the Grand Slam tennis tournaments in the Open era (i.e. since 1968) who never won any of the other Grand Slam tournaments.

Australian Open

• Mark Edmondson (1976)
• Roscoe Tanner (Jan 1977)
• Vitas Gerulaitis (Dec 1977)
• Brian Teacher (1980)
• Johan Kriek (1981, 1982)
• Petr Korda (1998)
• Thomas Johansson (2002)

French Open

• Andres Gimeno (1972)
• Adriano Panatta (1976)
• Yannick Noah (1983)
• Michael Chang (1989)
• Andres Gomez (1990)
• Sergi Bruguera (1993, 1994)
• Thomas Muster (1995)
• Gustavo Kuerten (1997, 2000, 2001)
• Carlos Moya (1998)
• Albert Costa (2002)
• Juan Carlos Ferrero (2003)
• Gaston Gaudio (2004)

Wimbledon

• Pat Cash (1987)
• Michael Stich (1991)
• Richard Krajicek (1996)
• Goran Ivanisevic (2001)

US Open

• Manuel Orantes (1975)
• Patrick Rafter (1997, 1998)
• Andy Roddick (2003)
• Juan Martin Del Potro (2009)

So the numbers are: Australian Open 7, French Open 12, Wimbledon 4, US Open 4. Actually I think there's a case for saying that the French is even more of a statistical outlier than that makes it sound, because the Australian Open has only really been regularly attended by the top players since the late 1980s - for instance Bjorn Borg only ever played in it once, Jimmy Connors twice and John McEnroe twice during his Grand Slam-winning years. Cut down the qualifying period to since, say, 1990 and the numbers become 2, 8, 3, 3. I also strongly suspect that the US Open figure may come down as I think that it's highly likely (injury permitting) that Juan Martin Del Potro will win more Grand Slams.

As a further tangent it's interesting to note that while the French Open has been played on clay throughout its lifetime, and likewise Wimbledon on grass, the other two have had a more varied history: the Australian Open was played on grass up until 1987, and on various flavours of hard court since, and the US Open was played on grass until 1974, on clay from 1975 to 1977 and on a slightly different kind of hard court thereafter. Honestly, make your minds up.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Wimbledon hero and quarter-final escapologist Andy Murray in trademark self-excoriating square-mouthed bellow-y pose, and Garrett Morris in Larry Cohen's amusing 1985 horror film The Stuff, in getting-turned-inside-out-by-carnivorous-yoghurt pose.

No need to shell out for The Stuff on DVD, just in case you were going to, as the whole movie appears to be available on YouTube. If you just want the bit where Garrett Morris turns into a yoghurt dispenser, here it is. Larry Cohen also directed the considerably better (but still quite silly) monster movie Q The Winged Serpent (as mentioned in my New York roundup here, since it features the Chrysler Building prominently).

meet the wankers

With reference to this BBC News story about "name meshing" as practised by zany modern people getting married I'll just say: I thought of it first! Except that I didn't, because this Telegraph article from November 2012 reckons that people in America had already been doing it for six years. Oh well.

A couple of other things: it's interesting, if you watch the video, to see what a relatively large proportion of the couples doing interesting mashups of their names are same-sex couples. I imagine that there's maybe a sense of being less weighed down by the baggage of "tradition" in these cases, since the whole idea of same-sex unions is pretty recent (and I acknowledge that there's some way to go yet), and therefore a bit more of a sense of freedom to make your own rules. Or it could be pure chance, and that could just be bollocks. Who knows.

The other thing is that the BBC article makes a reference to lovable showbiz couple Chris O'Dowd and Dawn Porter having done this when they got married in August 2012. That's not quite right, as it happens, as while she seems to have adopted the name Dawn O'Porter, apparently seriously, he remains resolutely Chris O'Dowd, so it's not really a very good example. If they were following the rules (inasmuch as there are any) it really ought to be something like O'Dorter or O'Dowter anyway, the general convention being roughly half of each of the original names plus whatever mucking about with the bit in the middle you need to do to make it pleasing/pronounceable/amusing.

Clearly these rules can lead to some amusing imaginary celebrity pairings. I'll start you off with rock'n'roll pioneer Carl Perkins (whose 81st birthday it would have been today, had he not died in 1998) and tennis star Chris Evert becoming Carl and Chris Pervert, and stylist Gok Wan and actress Zoe Lucker becoming Gok and Zoe Wanker. No doubt you can make up your own.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Former world and Olympic downhill skiing champion and golfing WAG Lindsey Vonn, and former world tennis #1 and golfing WAG Caroline Wozniacki.

how do you slam a problem like maria

Here's a thought that occurred to me while watching Maria Sharapova win the French Open a couple of weeks ago. No, it wasn't that, you filthy pervert. Well, all right, it was that, but there was another thing as well.

Sharapova's win gave her a full set of all the Grand Slam singles titles; she is the seventeenth person overall and the tenth woman to achieve this feat. What makes Sharapova's version of the feat interesting is that she has done it in the most efficient way possible, i.e. by winning each tournament precisely once - Wimbledon in 2004, the US Open in 2006, the Australian Open in 2008 and now the French Open in 2012. It occurred to me to wonder whether anyone else had achieved the feat that way, without wasting time and effort mucking about winning lots of multiples of individual tournaments on the way and pointless nonsense like that.

So here's a couple of lists for you - firstly the women:

Player	Tournament achieved	Year	Wins to date
Maureen Connolly	French Open	1953	5
Doris Hart	US Open	1954	5
Shirley Fry Irvin	Australian Open	1957	4
Margaret Court	Wimbledon	1963	7
Billie Jean King	French Open	1972	7
Chris Evert	Australian Open	1982	14
Martina Navratilova	US Open	1983	7
Steffi Graf	US Open	1988	5
Serena Williams	Australian Open	2003	5
Maria Sharapova	French Open	2012	4

Then the men:

Player	Tournament achieved	Year	Wins to date
Fred Perry	French Open	1935	5
Don Budge	French Open	1938	4
Rod Laver	US Open	1962	6
Roy Emerson	Wimbledon	1964	6
Andre Agassi	French Open	1999	4
Roger Federer	French Open	2009	14
Rafael Nadal	US Open	2010	9

Since golf has a very similar major tournament structure, one might ask the same question there as well. Note that it's almost impossible to construct a women's list here as the tournaments which qualify as majors have fluctuated so much over the years, so we'll have to make do with just the men here.

Player	Tournament achieved	Year	Wins to date
Gene Sarazen	Masters	1935	7
Ben Hogan	Open	1953	9
Gary Player	US Open	1965	4
Jack Nicklaus	Open	1966	6
Tiger Woods	Open	2000	4

People whose feat matches Sharapova's are in bold in the tables - needless to say they also have a "4" in the "Wins" column. In case it's still not clear they are:

• Shirley Fry Irvin (tennis)
• Don Budge (tennis)
• Andre Agassi (tennis)
• Gary Player (golf)
• Tiger Woods (golf)

You may have that factoid for free for your next dinner party. No, you're welcome.

further hackery

Here's another one: this entry in the Independent's list of sporting team-mates falling out with each other. It's about French tennis player Amélie Mauresmo:

Mauresmo (pictured) won the Australian Open as a 19-year-old but her physical build attracted negative comments from other women on the tour - Martin Hingis famously describing her as 'half man'.

I can do this one without having to look anything up - Mauresmo reached the Australian Open final in 1999 (as a 19-year-old), but she didn't win, in fact she lost to possible Swiss Army knife owner and probable crack whore Martina Hingis. Her less famous brother Martin Hingis was not, as far as I know, involved.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

A sporting one today: 1991 Wimbledon men's singles champion Michael Stich and Australian fast bowling all-rounder and recent recipient of several ladlefuls of steaming hot Ashes justice Mitchell Johnson.

court short

Let me commemorate the start of Wimbledon 2008 by pointing out that number 3 seed Novak Djokovic has just lost in straight sets to Marat Safin, who you'll recall I mentioned as a possible source of upsets last year. I was unforgivably remiss in not using the amusing phrase "dangerous floater" on that occasion, so let me rectify that here. I'm planning to eat a whole Pizza Express American Hot pizza when I get home from the golf course tonight, so I may have need of the phrase in a slightly different context tomorrow morning.

Continuing the tennis/childish sniggering theme, my old mate Graham always used to refer to former Wimbledon and US Open finalist Mark Philippoussis as Arse Willy Poo Piss. Which is undeniably very amusing.

On a similarly childish (but non-tennis-related) note the lovely Hazel bought some posh handwash for the bathroom the other day from Molton Brown. It could be just me, but this strikes me as an amusing phrase in a similar way, i.e. if the pizza is particularly indigestible I could have a nasty case of the molten browns in the morning. Not for the first time.

Martina Hingis is a crack whore

It's true! Well, sort of true. Well, according to her not true at all, actually.

But I think, taking a rational and considered view, and in the light of my previous post about her personal life, that it's probably safe to assume, on balance, that yes, she was snorting cocaine off Anna Kournikova's freshly-showered buttocks in the locker-room at Wimbledon. Well, I would.

what does she DO to them? I think we all know...

One last tennis-related story as Wimbledon fever dies down a bit - Martina Hingis had a pretty forgettable Wimbledon by her standards; surviving a couple of match points against chubby ginger British no-hoper Naomi Cavaday and then going out to Laura Granville of the USA in the third round. No, the real story here is Hingis' recent(ish) engagement to Czech player and former world #8 Radek Štěpánek.

Nothing so remarkable there, you might think, and I'd be the last person to encourage feverish and sweaty-palmed prurient speculation about female tennis players' private boudoir activities, but just this once: the "Swiss Miss" has a bit of previous in this department, as it happens. I'll take you through it:

• Justin Gimelstob went out with Hingis briefly back in 1997. He has suffered from chronic back injuries ever since, though he still plays on the tour.
• Up-and-coming (no, stop it) Spaniard Julian Alonso started dating Hingis the following year. From a career high of world #30 that year he quickly sank without trace.
• Magnus Norman reached the French Open final in 2000 (losing to Gustavo Kuerten) and started seeing Hingis the same year. He retired in 2004 after struggling with severe hip injuries since 2001.

It's all earned her the nickname "The Black Widow" in some quarters. And now....Štěpánek has had a back injury since late 2006, roughly when he popped the question. Coincidence? I want you to picture a series of robust, healthy tennis players filing one by one into Hingis' bedroom and emerging a few months later as shrivelled, exhausted, hollow-eyed, broken men. If that isn't fevered enough for you, imagine ex-doubles partner (no, stop it) Anna Kournikova doing it as well.

Wimbers post-mortem

Having just watched the end of the thrilling Federer-Nadal men's singles final this seems like as good a time as any for a few thoughts on the last fortnight.

Men's singles

For all my kind words about Tim Henman in my previous Wimbledon post, it was quite refreshing that his second-round exit and Andy Murray's wrist injury removed any British interest and allowed the less partisan of us to sit back and enjoy the tennis. It was a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest, Roger Federer cruising through serenely with only a couple of brief moments of concern against Juan Carlos Ferrero (and the extra help, as if he needed it, of a bye when Tommy Haas pulled out injured). Rafael Nadal, on the other hand, had to battle through five-setters against Soderling and Youzhny, and was lucky to have been spared another in the semi-final against Novak Djokovic when his opponent had to withdraw with a foot injury at one set all.

I was disappointed that Marat Safin didn't give Federer more of a match when they met in the third round, but that's the engima of Safin for you in a nutshell - massively talented, but unlucky with injuries over the years, and fundamentally a bit mental. It looked as if he was going to dominate men's tennis for years after he blew away Pete Sampras in the 2000 US Open final, but it hasn't quite worked out like that, although he did win the 2005 Australian Open, and his epic five-set defeat of Federer in the semi-finals there makes him the last man other than Nadal to beat Federer in a Grand Slam event, fact fans.

Anyway, we got the final we wanted, and it was all very exciting. It's a classic rivalry, really, Federer's touch and elegance against Nadal's pace and thunderous power, the rapier versus the broadsword if you will. If the progression from last year's final to this year's is continued next year then Nadal should win. To be fair he should really let Federer have the French Open in exchange.

To everyone's surprise, given the weather, the major competitions were finished on time, but some people had to cram an awful lot of matches in to achieve it. I wonder if the prevalence of injuries in the later stages of the men's singles - Djokovic and Gasquet in their respective semi-finals, and Nadal's knee twinge in the final - might have been down to the compressed schedule?

Women's singles

Less to say about this, really. Much respect to Marion Bartoli for getting to the final, but unless Venus Williams' weirdly long and slightly scary Anansi The Spider-Woman legs snapped off or something she was never going to win, and so it proved. Some dramatic matches on the way, though, of which Jelena Jankovic (of whom more below) against Lucie Safarova was probably the best one I saw; Jankovic against Bartoli was pretty good as well.

As was, for different reasons, Serena Williams against Daniela Hantuchova. Much to be said about the Williams sisters: they are incorrigible drama queens, and, I suspect, not above faking or exaggerating the odd injury to gain an advantage (not that Serena's initial calf injury was faked, by the look of it), and they both play a thwacking, grunting style of tennis that is far from aesthetically pleasing to watch. But, more importantly than all this, they really, really want to win. There was a moment when Serena came out after getting injured and losing the second set to Hantuchova where she looked across the net at her as if to say: I'm on one and a half legs, at best, here, but I still reckon I can beat you. Do you have the balls to prove me wrong? I don't think you do. And she was absolutely right, as Hantuchova promptly went to pieces so fast people in the front row of the crowd got hit by the shrapnel. Which is one of the reasons Serena is an ex-world #1 and multiple Grand Slam champion and Hantuchova, while making a nice enough living out of the game (and the modelling contracts) will never win a major tournament. The other reason is that Hantuchova is the frail willowy type and Williams looks like she could go ten rounds with Iron Mike Tyson and still have enough energy left to crack walnuts with her buttocks.

Doubles

The only thing I have to say here is: I'm watching the mixed doubles final now and if the fevered tabloid rumours are true regarding the off-court relationship between Jamie Murray and Jelena Jankovic, then he is an extremely lucky boy, as he is a slightly weedy pale Scotsman who looks a bit like Doogie Howser MD, while she is what I can only describe as Very Fit Indeed.

the obligatory Wimbledon post

Not any in-depth analysis I'm afraid, I just felt inspired to write something after watching the closing stages of today's play in the Henman-Moya match (locked at 2 sets all and 5-all in the fifth when bad light stopped play).

A quick word about Tim Henman. My view of Henman's career is this: he's been, by a huge distance, the best male British tennis player certainly of the open era and probably since the days of Fred Perry, and we should probably appreciate him a bit more than we do, even if he is a bit posh. If his peak years hadn't happened to coincide with those of a certain Pete Sampras I have no doubt he would have won Wimbledon at least once. But 4 Wimbledon semi-finals and one each at the French Open and the US Open, as well as 10 full ATP tour titles and many years in the top 10, is pretty good, especially if you compare it with his predecessors as British #1; I mean, Jeremy Bates? Buster Mottram? He was never in the very top bracket because he could never overpower players with his service the way Sampras could. That isn't necessarily something that rules you out of winning major championships, but it does mean that you have to be an eyes-on-stalks success freak to do it. Jimmy Connors would be the perfect example - no cheap service games for him, but no-one wanted to win more than he did.

Anyway, this year's Wimbledon. Needless to say Federererererer is the overwhelming favourite for the men's singles title, but I have a feeling he might not have things all his own way this year. If I had to guess I would say the likelihood is he'll either slip up against Marat Safin in round 3, or Roddick in the semis or the final, otherwise he'll win. I just have a sneaky feeling it might be Roddick's year, though.

As for the ladies the papers seem to think it's between last year's finalists Justine Henin and Amelie Mauresmo. I think that, as long as she stays fit, Serena Williams is probably the woman to beat, though. At the very least it gives me an excuse to reproduce the picture here. If it's not one of these it'll be one of the Russians, most likely Sharapova or Kuznetsova, though both have been carrying injuries recently.

Centre Court looks a bit weird with the roof off, too, a bit more like the big open arenas at Roland Garros or Flushing Meadow. I'm sure we'll get used to it. Just as long as Cliff doesn't put in an appearance I'll be happy.