On Sunday afternoon, 21 British players were into the main draw of the Wimbledon men’s and women’s singles. By sunset on Monday, only nine remained. Despite bright sunshine and balmy temperatures in SW19 what seemed an idyllic start to the tournament rapidly morphed into a nightmare, a truly miserable Monday, as 10 Brits fell on the opening day – the worst return for the home nation this century.
Twelve homegrown players were scheduled for the first day of the Championships. One didn’t make it at all, as Emma Raducanu withdrew late on Sunday night before she had been slated to open play on Court No 1 on Monday afternoon. Her latest in a litany of frustrating injury setbacks came as a recent “niggle” she had been managing developed into a full-blown stress fracture, and she was advised not to compete.
So 12 was down to 11, and of those survivors, three were knocked out by lunchtime. Things then went from bad to worse: at 2.30pm came the announcement that Jack Draper was to follow Raducanu as the highest-profile British player in his draw to pull out, this time with a recurrence of the arm injury that forced him to miss seven months of the tour between August and February.
That news came as Harriet Dart, unexpectedly promoted to Court No 1 after Raducanu’s exit, was locked in an almighty tussle against Jelena Ostapenko. Having dropped the first three games before needing a medical timeout it looked as though Dart might be going the way of her other fallen compatriots, but she rallied in spirited fashion to push the ever-combustile Latvian to three bruising sets.
But as Ostapenko wobbled her way through her service games and produced 13 double faults it was a tie that could easily have gone the other way, and an obviously disappointed Dart was bitterly aware of this as she walked off court with her head covered by a towel.
She joined wildcards Mika Stojsavljevic (lost in straight sets to 11th seed Belinda Bencic) Felix Gill (lost in three sets to 23rd seed Rafael Jodar), and Alicia Dudeney (lost in straight sets to Alycia Parks), and Max Basing (lost in straight sets to fellow qualifier Shintaro Mochizuki) in making a swift exit out of the All England Club gates.
The dominoes kept falling as teenagers Mimi Xu and Hannah Klugman lost almost at the same time, falling to Daria Kasatkina and 2024 champion Barbora Krejcikova. The draw certainly was not kind to many of the Brits.
While Dart was grappling with Ostapenko the hopes of a nation were slowly descending onto the shoulders of British No 1 Cameron Norrie, so often the last one standing at a major championships. The 30-year-old, seeded 26th, normally produces his best tennis at home, something he acknowledged after the fact.
But he was condemned to his earliest exit at Wimbledon since 2018 by talented college player Michael Zheng, who prevailed in a match tie-break after five closely fought sets. The 22-year-old went through qualifying to reach all three major main draws this year and was a tricky first-round draw despite making his debut at the tournament, having been a junior finalist here.
Norrie later described him as “one of the best college players, if not the best college player, at the moment”. But he would have expected to edge the encounter, especially after recovering from the rib injury which hampered him during the clay season.
The exodus continued as qualifier Oliver Tarvet saved three match points in a gritty display against 25th seed Arthur Rinderknech but eventually fell in four sets. Tarvet – who memorably made it to the second round last year, losing to Carlos Alcaraz – put up a fight for more than four hours, and needed a medical timeout after a nasty fall in the third.
Fran Jones then lost in straight sets to Diane Parry to cap a record-breaking day, while the numbers could have been even worse had Jack Pinnington Jones’ match against Brandon Nakashima not been suspended due to bad light, with the Brit two sets to love down.
There was no faulting the effort on display, or the significance of the crowd’s support behind every player. Norrie said afterwards: “I fought really hard. I felt the desire, the hunger, which is important. It’s just tough to fight every point, and you come out on the losing side. But that’s sport.”
Dart shrugged off the idea that there was any greater weight of expectation on the British players’ shoulders. She said: “It’s not just being a British player out there. I think every player has pressure, regardless of the situation. And no matter how many times you do it, someone’s always feeling the pressure. It’s just how people handle it, and some people handle it better than others.”
But after two high-profile injury withdrawals and a torrent of first-day losses, with British players winning just five of 29 sets played, there was not much to be cheery about. Least of all for the LTA, who stuck to their strategy of showering wildcards on promising British hopefuls and now have little to show for it.
For all the money funnelled into British players, the two most prominent are dealing with injury after injury, while the remainder are struggling to match the likes of Americans, Ukrainians, or Italians in terms of numbers in the top 10 and consistency at the top level. Miserable Monday at Wimbledon threw that into stark relief.
Norrie summed it up: “It always stinks to lose, especially at Wimbledon, my favorite tournament in the world, a tournament I always play so well at. I played well today.
“I think it just takes probably a week or so for this kind of loss to get over. There’s no hiding from it. Yeah, it stinks.”
