Seeing tennis in the flesh… simply, oh yes, amazing. Who’d a thought, furry yellow balls would float my boat. Tennis is fast-paced, sweaty and raw – yet it’s packed with emotion, personality, and glamour on a mighty world stage. My debut at Wimbledon was a wet and windy one, mixed in with random blue skies.
Today
I Finally got my ass into gear to write about my outings at Wimbledon. After a fairly mundane day at the office I switched on the tellie to see the highlights of day eleven. Such a fantastic day of play, with some unreal results. Henin, Ivanovic (damn), Roddick and Baghdatis out… Venus, Bartoli (!), Federer, Nadal and Gasquet still alive.
Four days prior… the best queue ever!
English people love to queue, no doubt. Queuing at Wimbledon is an ominous task – people queue overnight to get main court tickets. However, I enjoyed a pleasant (90 minute) queue for Wimbledon ground tickets, after a one hour tube journey from Waterloo to Southfields. Andy and I were in the gate by 10.22am. We even got stickers with “I’ve queued at Wimbledon 2007″, and sampled some tasty juice freebies.
Wohoo… we made it
Then it started to rain… feck. After a short wait on court 11, we finally got to see some tennis action at 12 noon. Ana Ivanovic v.s. Aravane Rezai – nice one bro. Wow, we were both amazed to see the aggression and skill of these two young ladies as they slugged it out, putting our tennis skills to shame. It’s the first time I’ve seen Ana play (I googled her the night before, slack I know) but now I’m a fan. Dreamy.
Wimbledon tour with Ana: video here.
Bag daddys
I first saw Marcos Baghdatis when he made the Australian Open final (watching it from my NZ sofa before embarking on my UK journey). Yep, so very cool to see him play for real (destroying Nalbandian) and hearing his Cyprus posse chant “Marcos Baghdatis! Marcos Baghdatis!” throughout the match.
Other players I saw were Hewett and Davydenko; overall Wimbledon was very inspiring. Now I’m amping to play some tennis and apply my newly found Wimbledon knowledge, to my personal game.
Stats:
- Ground pass: £18
- Strawberries & Cream: £2
- Sweatband: £5 (pair)
- Duration of play: 6 sets ~ 3 hours
- Umbrella usage: 70%
