"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London.
No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life;
for there is in London all that life can afford."~ Samuel Johnson in 1777 ( Read more... )

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same"
(Rudyard Kipling's "IfEvery year for two weeks, the British put on the greatest show on earth. I don't care what anybody else says, but there is nothing as good as The Championships at Wimbledon. It's the (only) highlight in the British tennis calendar and the ( Read more... )

When Roger Federer stepped onto Centre Court on Tuesday 30 June 2015, it marked his 63rd consecutive Grand Slam singles appearance, a record-breaking streak (for men and women) dating back to the 2000 Australian Open. If it wasn't for his losses as a qualifier in the preceding US and Australian Opens of 1999, he might easily have been playing his ( Read more... )

...I arrived in London to settle here permanently. The photos below were taken on the night and subsequent morning of that memorable journey. It was my first flight to Blighty in three years - and I only stayed a night on that occasion - so this was actually my first proper visit in nearly four years. I was over the moon, making childhood dreams ( Read more... )

Murray was 30-0 on serve at 5-6 in the second set. At 30-15 he over hit a forehand down the middle, was duly broken and lost the set. Then came the game from hell. I can't remember a longer one since the Graf/Sanchez-Vicario Final at Wimbledon in 1995. This year's marathon game went on for nearly twenty minutes. Ten deuces and several break points ( Read more... )

This isn't the first time the Swiss maestro suffered a back injury in the Fourth Round and went on to win The Championships. The same happened in 2003. History repeating itself? :)

Seventh Wimbledon (equalling Pete Sampras's Open era record), seventeenth Grand Slam (extending his own record) and world number one (equalling Sampras's record of 286 weeks at the top). All at the age of thirty, exactly one month short of his next birthday. Only two other thirty-something men had won The Championships in the Open Era (Rod Laver in ( Read more... )

The People's Final. Two weeks ago this seemed a distant dream but that's the beauty of sport. It's good to know that elegance and subtlety can still succeed at the highest level of men's tennis. The manner in which Federer dispatched of the world number one served a timely reminder to those who had written him off. There's no doubt that the power- ( Read more... )

This one is tougher to call. I would love for Murray to become the first male Briton to reach a Wimbledon singles final since Bunny Austin in 1938, so long as he then lost to Federer in the final. However were he to play Djokovic, I would definitely root for the Scot (I mean) Brit. In reaching his fourth consecutive Wimbledon semi-final, Murray has ( Read more... )

When the two meet on Friday it'll be their sixth semi-final match-up in the last eight Grand Slams. The Serb has won four of them including the last one in Paris less than a month ago. But this is the first time they're meeting at Wimbledon and on grass. Federer is the six-time champion whose making his first Wimbledon semi-final appearance since ( Read more... )