This year I finally remembered to enter the Wimbledon ballot and we were allocated tickets for the 2nd Tuesday on court 1. Women's quarter finals and no British nonsense as by that time they were long gone. As were the Dutch of course.
Here are some pictures, we did find a Dutch boy playing on court 14, so we took some pictures of him...
There are two good things about actually having tickets. The first is you can get into Centre Court or Court 1, where the action is, especially in the second week. And the second is that you don't have to start queuing at 6am for the gates to open at 10 and the matches to start at noon. Believe me, that is not fun. When we left, there were already people queuing for the next day as there are 500 Centre Court and 500 Court 1 tickets up for grabs each day.
We therefore left home around 9.30, had a very friendly but frustrating Sainsbury member of staff trying to figure out how to put batteries into the Sports Relief fan we wanted to buy and got on the train to get there at 11am and in time for a good stroll around.
The first picture is the stream of people going from the station to the ground, the other ones are taken inside the ground.
What used to be Henman Hill or Rusedski Ridge or Murray Mound was nameless in the second week.
We spotted a Dutchman, eventual winner Thiemo de Bakker in action. Of course we thought the opponent was Thiemo at first, but the third picture we got it right. Not that famous at the moment, but apparently the first Dutch junior grand slam winner since Sjeng Schalken.
After walking around we settled into our seats at Court 1. Totally at the back, but still a great view.
First up was Justine Henin-Hardenne against Bresmond. Justine won 6-4 6-4 but it was not easy.
Then it was time for the eventual winner to take on Myskina. Janice did not think she was worthy of a picture, but she fought well and made it a good game. Mauresmo won in three sets.
And these gentlemen (Knowles and Nestor, Aspelin and Perry) started the longest ever match at Wimbledon. The day after, Knowles and Nestor would win 23-21 in the 5th set.
