LAURA ROBSON - Brough Scott

BROUGH SCOTT
LAURA ROBSON

It was always going to be much more than a tennis match. It was seeing the future made flesh. It was a wondrous Wimbledon welcome to the surprise new arrival in our national sporting family.  Let’s hope we are a long time together. For after yesterday Laura Robson has become our darling overnight.

She is gorgeous with a lovely, open, bright and smiling face a tennis game to match. This week’s victories had seen the great and good pronounce Laura the real deal but once outed as Britain’s latest big new hope only victory against the difficult to spell let alone pronounce Noppawan Lertcheewakarn of Thailand  was going to be good enough. It took three sets.  There were a couple of moments of teenage strop as Laura lost out in the second set but she came through like the winner she is said to be. There could be a lot more of this.

At 14, (can she really be just 14?) she is already a poised and elegant young lady having in the last year grown to 5 ft 7 inches and upped her serve to well over 100 mph. She has a beautiful open backswing and hits flowing winners off either wing. Her opponent was a very different type of athlete, two years older maybe but shorter, chunkier and strangely double fisted on either side which, when she dipped her knees to pull round her forehand, made it look as if she was throwing the hammer.   
Laura broke her in the second game and race to 3-0. If she held her concentration you could see that she could outclass the best player to ever come out of the ancient city of Chiang Mai where the 300 Buddhist temples must seem a long way from the lawns of the All England Club. It was not entirely easy because the Thai girl was a scrapper in the rallies and our new darling still has quite a way to go. “She doesn’t move well enough yet,” said one of the experts.  Maybe not but she broke at to lead 5-3 and then served out to close the set and set us all thinking about how we are going to accommodate Laura Robson into our sporting consciousness.

There was a strange mood in the crowd – not quite like watching a proper match. It was a mixture of curiosity and anticipation. For what was in front of us was an image which was going to become framed and familiar in the retinue. Laura Robson poised at the baseline, the pigtail neat behind the white sun visor, the head bowed in concentration as the right hand bounces the ball before the swinging service action. She is 14. There could be ten, crikey, maybe even twenty years of this.
Then it’s not just our concentration that wavers, Thai’s finest is a gutsy little fighter and she began to dig out the winners as Laura wilted. Nobody could call Noppawan a classical player nor easily fail to guess her origins as she graced the court in something close to national costume. She sported a high necked blouse with striped epaulettes a black lace belt at the back and a split skirt with gold lace trimming, not to mention a red and gold flower brooch in her hair.  It didn’t look the coolest outfit but as Laura began to buckle and ended the set throwing her racket to the ground with a screech of anguish.

There was a feeling of slight embarrassment that we should have so indulged ourselves with hope that we were now blaming a 14 year old girl for not winning a final at the first time of asking. But in 1990, I remember watching a 14 year old Jennifer Capriati getting to the 4th round in the main draw. If Laura Robson really was what Billy Jean King and the rest of them said in the morning papers she needed to win this. The second point of the third set was a metronomic  rally which finally saw the Thai girl weaken. Laura was on the roll again. Noppawan  was broken. The mood changed from complaint to realisation. We had a new Princess to shout about.

We had been witnesses to history.  A table draped in the Union Jack was brought on and Ann Jones came out to present the prizes. She is silver haired now but still has those same big smiling teeth we remember winning  The Championship in 69. Laura came out to receive the trophy. She was ushered across to pose for the photographers and then to parade round the court for spectators to see her. She didn’t  really know how to do it, clutching the cup to her like a 14 year old does with a “just look at me smile” at a school prize giving.

She will learn – and so, we hope, will we.

NADAL DOES IT - Brough Scott

BROUGH SCOTT
NADAL DOES IT

It ended in darkness but the pair of them had given us a blazing, eternal light. No sport, no playwright has ever conjured up such magical theatre as those last three games as Rafa finally found his moment and threw himself triumphantly back on to the dew-gathering Wimbledon turf.

It was sixteen minutes past nine on the clock, four hours forty minutes of shower interrupted play which had always demanded a finish like this. There had been times in the first three sets when the match had not fully delivered what we all knew these two heroes were capable of. There were even moments when King Roger’s head dipped and his racket swished in frustration at the prospect that his reign might be over without truly engaging in a fight. He was engaged now.

Leading 7-6 with Rafa serving he took the first point. As we heard the score called “Love Fifteen” we did the lightning arithmetic and realised that Roger was just three points away from that so coveted 6th title. Just three points but they are hard to come by in the gathering gloom, with the crowd hushing down and Rafa Nadal going through to hold serve at the other end.

With the scores level the drama moves forward almost too quickly. With no break between games Roger is suddenly 15-40 down and once again facing into the unthinkable abyss he has been so close to before. Any earlier doubts of the full ferocious pride of this champion were dispelled as he crashed through a 125 mph ace. But he could not hold the white bandana figure across the net. He was broken. At ten past nine with well over four and a half hours of the unimaginably intense one on one combat Rafa was serving for the match in the gloaming.

It was quite impossibly dark. A lone pigeon had somehow evaded the efforts of Wimbledon’s hired falcon and was circling low level as Rafa bent over his serve and the stadium was so hushed that the only sound was the bouncing of the just visible yellow ball. An owl was needed but Federer must have night vision . For Rafa now had two match points and his first serve was a bullet to Roger’s backhand. In a flash of mesmerising, instinctive reactive genius it was slashed back past Rafa for a clear winner. It could not have happened but it had.

Yet the end had to come – and with the force that is Nadal, come it would. All the years, all the delights and awesome wonders that have been Federer had been put before us as this afternoon had moved to night but now a new champion would not be denied the birthright his talent has decreed. To have winners or losers seemed almost impolite but the rules demand it. For every magical Federer moment, the feathered slice, the swift footed  drive, the brutal wide-swing forehand, there was a Nadal return, or best of all, that inimitable whipped forehand down the line winner. Now was the time.

The executioner’s blow was self inflicted – a Federer forehand dumped into the net. Rafa lay on his back, a white figure arms and legs extended as if he was trying to send a “X” kiss signal to outer space. As he returned to our world he wanted to plant kisses of his own. In an instant he was up on to the players’ box to not only hug “Team Nadal” but to first walk along to pay respects to the Federer family and then, cloaked loyally in the Spanish flag, he trod nimbly over the top of the score box roof to thank the Prince and Princess of Spain for coming to see him follow up his compatriots’ triumph in the European Championships.

The presentations needed floodlights but what we saw we treasured. Federer had fought like a lion to hold on to his kingdom but now he was back into full courtesy mode. In his moment of defeat he lifted both himself and his listeners by paying tribute to the man that had beaten him. Sport is about winning but at the end it is also just about sport.

Then Nadal came forward. English is very much a second language in which “thank you very much” plays a fairly large part. But last night he not only fulfilled his destiny, he and Federer showed how sport can do something more than be “the opium of the masses.”  He and his opponent had given us something we will never forget.

As Rafa did his victory tour the camera flashes sparked gold on the trophy. Of this night, of this most dramatic, most wondrous of tennis matches, the memories will always be golden too.