Good morning all. I'll be at Queen's Club again today to follow the matches there. I also have pictures for you from yesterday, but I'll need to post the web gallery later on in this space. I picked up a cold yesterday, probably after spending so much time in the wind at the top of the stands, and as a result was a lot slower in starting my day, so I haven't had the chance to sort out the whole lot - if I spend more time on it today I'll miss a large chunk of the tennis.
In fact that's likely to happen anyway. Even getting to and from the tournament yesterday was a nightmarish experience. One of the key reasons for my moving outside London some years back was the traffic in the city - I'm not a patient driver, and being stuck in a slow-moving queue of cars while waiting to find a way out of a one-way system that I turned into by accident really wears me out. Yesterday's Tube strike meant that I couldn't use my usual route to Queen's Club, which involves leaving my car in Southfields (where parking is not yet shut off due to preparations for Wimbledon) and riding the underground to Baron's Court. Instead I was forced to drive most of the way, leaving my car in Earl's Court and catching the shuttle bus laid on by the Queen's Club organisers. Today there's likely to be more of the same.
In spite of the problems getting there, I managed to see - or at least, cover - large parts of yesterday's matches. Andy Murray won very convincingly on the Centre Court, but during it I was keeping a close watch on the match between Marcos Baghdatis and Mikhail Youzhny taking place on Court 1. The two split sets before Youzhny prevailed; it mostly looked just like hard-hitting hardcourt tennis. I then went down to courtside on Court 1 for part of match between Portugal's Frederico Gil and Lleyton Hewitt. On the Centre Court photographers have chairs to sit on; on Court 1, which isn't televised, the accommodation consists of sitting on the tarpaulin on the edge of the court, which yesterday was a little bit damp. Still, it's a way of getting closer to the players in order to photograph them, and it at least made it possible for me to wonder whether I was being personally subjected to all those hard stares from Hewitt as he lost the first set. I expect that TV viewers might have enjoyed some of Gil's gestures of frustration as Hewitt came back to take the next two, including batting his racquet against the ground (though not enough to damage the grass). The Hewitt lob was in fine form, and plenty of his shots went for winners.
The last match of the day I saw was that between Gilles Simon and Grigor Dimitrov, on the Centre Court. I missed hearing the announcements made at the start of the match, but I have to assume that when the announcers gave brief biographies of the players, they had pointed out that Dimitrov isn't long past his eighteenth birthday. In any event, the teenager got plenty of support from the crowd - its female component in particular, it appeared, judging by the sighs of disappointment that came when he missed a shot, and the tone of applause he received during the second set when he finally broke Simon's serve - only to be broken back in the next game.
