Anyone for Tennis?

“He’s silencing the crowd now Melzer, thats half the battle won,” said the commentator as the Austrian put his nation 5-2 up in the third set of their Davis Cup tie at Wimbledon. A reasonable statement in many senses, but not when it has come within a minute of a close up camera shot of a young fan asleep, and is followed by a wide angled shot of sparsely populated Number One court seats, save for the occasional person with a newspaper on their head, then I take issue with it.

Tennis folk love to make it known that ‘nothing compares to the partisan atmosphere’ of Davis Cup ties. After over an hour of Alex Bogdanovic’s opening rubber against Johan Melzer I can instead conclude that several things compare to a Davis Cup tie’s ‘partizan atmosphere’. Non-league football, school swimming galas, Robot Wars... the list could go on. The truth is, whilst in central and eastern Europe a tennis crowd can seem intimidating, when it comes to Britain a tennis audience is about as fearsome as marginally irate goldfish.

Think back, if you can bear it, to what the late 1990s press dubbed ‘Henmania’. Far from being a free for all of unwavering support what this ‘mania’ actually resembled was nearer a cross between the Last Night of the Proms and a meeting of the Women’s Institute Amateur Dramatics Society. No amount of plastic Union Jack hats and giant autographed tennis balls could disguise from what essentially was menopausal, suburban housewives getting unnaturally giddy over a middle-class man playing a middle-class sport.

Thats the problem with tennis, despite its desire to appeal to a wider demographic, it remains very much in this country a middle-class world. Wimbledon’s British Racing Green hoardings and hedgerows, strawberries and cream and Roger Federer’s blazers are no more catalysts for a partisan atmosphere than a wine-tasting nor a jam making contest. So please get things in perspective, stop describing this mini flag waving and air horn toting as partisan and instead draw a more direct parallel; think of a village fete where Maude from the post office has spent a little too long sampling Farmer Thompson’s home-made cider.