Four hours, two tie-breaks and a crowd of nine. The house final nobody was watching turned into the best tennis of the term.
The far court is where you get sent when the fixture does not matter. It has a fence that eats balls, a service line that has been repainted twice and never quite in the same place, and no bench.
By the third set there were nine people watching. By the fourth there were forty.
What made it worth watching was not the standard, which was ordinary, but the refusal. Neither player would shorten a point. Every rally went the distance it wanted to go.
Courtside Desk Stories filed by the Courtside editors.
A coach at seven, rain until eleven, and four hours of tennis compressed into ninety minutes of daylight.
It loses more points than it wins. It is harder to teach, harder to time and worse against height. Keep it anyway.
They are on the courts before anyone and after everyone. We asked what four decades of grass has taught them about how we play.
We restrung six rackets to exactly the same specification and gave them back unlabelled. Only two players noticed.
