Serving Aces at Wimbledon

On Saturday I met my parents and grandmother, who are all visiting from the States, at Victoria Station where we picked up picnic essentials and jumped on the tube to head to Wimbledon.  My family is visiting for a week and we have so many London activities planned but Wimbledon was definitely going to be one of the highlights.  We had tickets for the middle Saturday and even though the famous televised matches did not begin until mid day, we arrived late morning to watch a few of the other matches on the outside courts.

As I had seen a photo on Instagram about the American Express lounge we headed there and picked up fans and great over the ear radios which provided fantastic commentary for the eight hours of intense matches we watched. After picking up the swag we found a bench near court 10 and were able to get quite close to a women’s double match which was a great start to our long day of tennis. 

We made sure to make our way to Court One well in advance of Serena Williams taking the court at 1pm.  Watching her play was pure magic and even though she is only ranked number 11 in the world she played like the greatest of all time and when the announcer called one of her hits an “angry ace” I laughed out loud – she is just terrific.  It was a relatively quick win over Germany’s Julia Goerges and great tennis – even though it was the 5th match up between the two and Serena has won every time (including in the Wimbledon semi-finals last year). 

The next match I was routing for the US’s Sloane Stephens but with a big turn around mid-match the win was taken by Johanna Konta of Great Britain who now plays Petra Kvitova today which should be a great match.   While the next match started only 10 minutes after we took a bit of a break for scones and cream before going back to watch the guys match – and it was a good thing we did, it was almost four hours. 

For the final match, the third round men’s Singles match between Portuguese player Joao Sousa and the British player Dan Evans and they was quite evenly matched. Ranked 69th and 61st respectively they traded fast tennis balls and nerves in a four hour match which ended with Sousa pulling out the W past midnight with a some truly incredible tennis, ending at ;6 -4, 7-5, 4-6, 6-4. As it went five sets it actually started to get dark and they actually closed the roof of the stadium.  

Have you been watching any of the tennis at Wimbledon?