Eastbourne tennis: Great Brits helping make it a week to cherish

Fittingly, on the longest day of the year, the tennis just rolled on and on. From an 11am start – the earliest sensible start time, given the arena preparations and the chance for the dew to burn off the grass – until the umpires finally called time at past nine o’clock, we had wall-to-wall, baseline-to-sideline matches.

After Wimbledon, Eastbourne is arguably Britain’s finest tennis event. (West Londoners in fine blazers at the Queens Club may beg to differ…) But the Devonshire Park, as a people’s event brimming with top action, happy faces and sparkling sunshine, is once again proving a massive success.

Serena's verdict on her Eastbourne comeback.

The best of Tuesday's photos.

And this, folks, is the week that British players are reclaiming it. In too many previous years, we have hugely enjoyed the international influx of the world’s finest – with the consolation that Jo Konta would fly the flag, and the vain chance that one or two other young Brits might win a round or two. Well, for 2022 we must rewrite the script and revise the expectations. Everywhere you look there are great GB performances.

Tuesday saw several eye-catchers, including Jack Draper and Ryan Peniston on the young men’s side – and both are now on the Wednesday schedule for late-ish matches. Draper faces the hugely experienced Diego Schwartzman but has at least a puncher’s chance, while Peniston will bring his brimming energy to face hard-hitting Spaniard Pedro Martinez. Draper and Peniston are joined in Wednesday’s action by the two senior Brits, top seed Cam Norrie and lightning-seed Dan Evans. It just keeps getting better.

But it is the ladies who are catching attention with some startling results. Katie Boulter claimed an epic victory, before an ecstatic Centre Court crowd, over previous champion Karolina Pliskova – and the grounded, articulate Boulter will have moved on, on Wednesday, to face another top player – Petra Kvitova – with no fear. And deep into the evening of the Longest Day, there was arguably an even bigger triumph awaiting. Jodie Burrage, with one fine victory already under her belt, stepped out on to Court One to face top seed Paola Badosa.

Court One is the smaller arena, attached to Centre Court and to the west of it, and as the June shadows lengthened, the mountainous odds against a Burrage victory suddenly started to shorten. Jodie plays with no fear, and with a genuine smile on her face, and from the start she fought fire with fire, fetching back Badosa’s ferocious serves and delivering fierce attacking shots of her own.

While Serena Williams and Ons Jabeur were grabbing all the media attention, in Serena’s comeback from a twelve-month injury, those of us in the know had slipped away from the Centre Court razzmatazz, and our reward was an absolutely brilliant contest that Jodie Burrage just edged, with bravery and conviction.

Whatever happens in the next 24, or 72, hours, Great Britain tennis has taken a step forward. These young players are, in the best sense of the word, ordinary. They still have long-suffering parents who drive them the length of the country, and who probably still pay their mobile phone bills. They laugh with their mates and they are relentlessly checking their Instagram – between matches, at any rate! They clear their own coffee cups - usually. They remember Grandma’s birthday (with a little nudge from aforesaid parents). And they remind us that sport is all about joy. About gleeful appetite, about celebration. They are winning matches, and admiration, and new followers for British tennis.

A final reflection, on that theme. At a frantic tournament like this one, reporters find themselves racing from match to match, court to court, and occasionally we find that – almost accidentally – we seem to have adopted a player or two. Through the weekend’s qualifying rounds, and now in the tournament proper, I have been courtside at least three times watching one of the Ukrainians at this week’s tournament – Lesia Tsurenko. Fine, stylish player with terrific focus and unflappability. Great sportsmanship, evidenced in her warm embrace with Heather Watson at the end of a match when she had ended the British favourite’s progress.

On Tuesday afternoon, Tsurenko progressed again with an impressive win on the Devonshire Park’s hidden secret court – Number 12, at the far end of the arena beneath a ring of trees and a little stone wall. Now then, as players come off court, protocol quite rightly forbids reporters from ambushing them – but I did exchange congratulations with her Ukrainian coach.

“Here is beautiful,” he said, glancing around, and in his heavily accented English: “You have sunshine and you have tennis. And for us, we have sunshine, we have tennis, and we have freedom…” Amen to that.