The Eleventh Day: the daily preview
If you are talking statistics, the line-up for today's Gentlemen's Singles semi-finals at the 2012 Championships is near-perfect, since four of the tournament's top five players are involved. But the fact that Rafael Nadal, the current second-best man on Planet Tennis, is indulging in a spot of fishing back home in Mallorca rather than battling it out on Centre Court is what makes the set-up as good as it could possibly be for The Hope of the Nation, Andy Murray.
This will be Murray's fourth straight Wimbledon semi-final. In the last two of these he went out to Nadal, and was seeded to face him again today, but this time the job of removing Rafa from the equation was accomplished in the second round by the little-known Lukas Rosol. The incentive is thus for Murray to seize the day against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France and do unto him what he has done on four of the five previous occasions they have clashed at the top level by winning.
The excitement about the possibility of actually getting a Brit to a Championships final threatens to bubble over, but the frenzy is understandable. It is 74 years now since Henry Austin, better known as Bunny, startled the tennis establishment by appearing in shorts rather than long white trousers at Wimbledon in 1938 and getting to the final. While it would be nice to recall that Bunny won in a breeze, he was soundly beaten by Don Budge, who went on to become the first to win the Grand Slam.
Murray, still seeking his first major singles title after sailing so close on three occasions, has now matched Tim Henman's feat of four Wimbledon semis. The real achievement will be to go one better and defeat Tsonga, who thinks he knows how Andy might go about it. Jo-Wilfried is a server of awesome power and ability, having lost just four of his 90 service games to date and hammered 75 aces, by some distance the best of the semi-final foursome.
The key to this match will be how successfully Murray, one of the best returners in tennis, deals with that Tsonga serve. "Andy is one of the people I don't like to play because he is returning really well," Tsonga said. "He can also play some really good passing shots and he's really quick."
The force seems to be with Murray after the fashion in which he recovered to see off David Ferrer in the quarters. As he acknowledges, doing what has worked against Tsonga so well in the past is what could swing it for him and make it time for Austin to be nudged off his pedestal.
Since Austin's day there have been 11 occasions on which a British man has got to the semi-finals here and failed to progress. Surely it is time that depressing sequence was terminated. And it could be, provided Murray can cope with the crushing weight of expectation. As he admits, "Subconsciously, I'm probably extremely stressed out right now, but I try not to feel it."
That match will be staged second on Centre Court, following the titanic collision between Novak Djokovic, striving for his second straight Wimbledon singles title, and Roger Federer, attempting to match Pete Sampras and become a seven-time champion here. The two have met 26 times already, with Federer 14-12 ahead, but this will be their first meeting on the lawns of The All England Club.
In the past 18 months Djokovic has defeated Federer in the semi-finals of the other three Grand Slams, while at Roland Garros in 2011 it was Federer who halted Djokovic's phenomenal 43-match winning streak last year, also at the semi-final stage.
Though he has subsequently descended to the level of mere mortals, Djokovic remains the leading man in the game. He had this to say about Federer the other day: "Roger has been on top of the men's game for so long. This is where he won six titles. And he definitely wants to prove to himself and to everybody else that he can win it once again."
But then there was this warning for the Swiss giant of the game: “I'm feeling good about this surface and about myself, so I'm going to try to win," Djokovic said. If he does, it will extend yet further Federer's failure to add to his record haul of 16 Grand Slam singles titles since his last success at the Australian Open in January 2010, which amounts to "failure" only by the exalted standards of this brilliant man.
