By John Parsons

Filed: 26/06/2024
sport.telegraph.uk

The first rain delay of The Championships could not have happened at a worse time for Lee Childs, the only one of 14 British wild cards to win a match at Wimbledon this year.

Yet to his credit the 20-year-old from Somerset was realistic enough not to offer that as more than a contributory irritation in his 6-2, 6-4, 6-3 second-round defeat by the prodigiously talented Spanish teenager, Rafael Nadal.

"I made too many mistakes. I wasn't solid enough from the start," Childs admitted after the first set had slipped away from him so comprehensively that even a group of spectators wrapped in the flag of St George decided they had seen enough.

Had they shown the big serving Childs rather more loyalty, they would at least have seen him produce a much more impressive and competitive second set - indeed but for one glaring volley error he might even have won it.

Then, at the start of the third set, he produced a couple of spectacular forehands to break in the opening game and the initiative was still very much with him when the frustrating drizzle sent them back to the locker-room for 52 minutes.

Nadal, the youngest player in the men's singles, admitted that "the rain came at a good moment for me because he was hot at that moment and I knew I was no longer hitting the ball so well as I had been earlier. Yeah, it was definitely to my advantage that we had the rain break.

"Early on I played some of my best tennis," said the exuberant Nadal, who covered the court with envious pace and scored freely for two sets with his excitingly whipped forehands.

"Then, towards the end of the second set and early in the third, I didn't play that well," added Nadal. "It was a combination of factors. He started to play better and I wasn't moving so well."

"Coming off when we did was disappointing, I could have done with staying on," said Childs. When they resumed, the hinted comeback on the same court where he had scored the first Wimbledon win of his career on Monday from two sets to one down against the 33rd seed, Nikolay Davydenko, evaporated all too swiftly.

He was passed on the first point, double-faulted on the second, shanked a forehand to 15-40 and then sent a backhand wide to lose his hard-earned advantage. In fact, he did not win another game.

Childs was also critical of himself for not serving so well as in the opening round though, particularly in the opening set and at the start of the second, it was his serve which was keeping him in the match.

The first sign of Childs putting real pressure on Nadal, who fully exploits the advantages of being a left-hander, came in the second game of the second set when Childs not only hit six aces but underlined his courage by hanging on grimly to fend off three break points.

His confidence soared and he looked the better player for a while, coming in regularly behind his own serve to put away positive rallies in a fashion we see all too seldom from most British players.

If only he had been able to take that one, most inviting chance to break for 5-4, his day might have ended as profitably as it had done after his first-round success. Instead Nadal, already 77 in the world rankings in his first season on the tour, took full advantage of his reprieve to break 487-ranked Childs in the game that followed.

So, in a week when the apparently never-ending shortcomings in British tennis have been so patently highlighted and when Greg Rusedski's embarrassing outburst can only harm the game's image, where does Childs go from here?

At 20 there is still time for him to build on his discovery this week that he is quite capable of playing as well, at least on grass and hard courts where his serve is such an ally, though only if he commits himself to the full.

His next tournament will be a Challenger event in Bristol starting on Monday week, when instead of the thousands packing the stands and every other vantage point around Court 13, they will only be counting the spectators in hundreds.

Yet, particularly after doing enough this week to restore some belief in those who have been waiting patiently for him at least to start making serious headway in the rankings, he needs to treat every match in Bristol as if he were still at Wimbledon.

For Nadal, the next challenge will come from Thailand's Paradorn Srichaphan, who recovered from two sets down to beat Frenchman Olivier Mutis.

"To have reached the third round, especially not having been able to play for a month [because of an elbow injury] is incredible," Nadal said. "Logic says I'll lose now, but who knows?"

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