Good God, the clattering of tennis balls and clinking of inferior champagne have reached fever pitch from Roland Garros, where a 16-year-old Russian prodigy named Mira Andreeva has just slapped the French Open junior title into submission. This, my incredulous friends, is the same Andreeva who, just weeks ago, was dispatching senior players like a particularly vindictive swarm of hornets. Her victory over the plucky Polish qualifier, one Weronika Chwalinska, was a masterclass in brutalist architecture: three sets of relentless power that left the young Pole’s fairytale entry into the main draw looking like a damp squib.
It was a match that had all the narrative grace of a stampeding rhino. And of course, because we must find some connection to the damp British isles, a gaggle of our very own tennis coaches, sporting tracksuits that look like failed attempts at camouflage, have now anointed a fresh-faced British qualifier, one Arthur Fils (wait, French? Dear God, my notes) as the next big thing.
They were seen celebrating with a tray of plastic cups filled with what I can only assume was Co-op own-brand fizz. It was a spectacle to rival the tennis itself: pure, unadulterated British optimism in a bottle that costs less than a fiver. Chwalinska might have lost, but she lost with grace.
The coaches? They lost with garish polyester and a misplaced sense of triumph. It’s a beautiful, absurd world we live in, where a British coaching team can celebrate a French win over a Pole as a victory for the Anglo-Saxon way.
Andreeva, meanwhile, probably doesn’t even know where Wimbledon is. She’s too busy being a tennis prodigy. But here in the land of drizzle and delusion, we’ll claim any small victory.
Because that’s what we do. We turn a Russian teenage rampage and a Polish fairytale into a British success story. Pass the gin.
And the tissues.
