Every June it starts the same way. Someone mentions strawberries. Someone else says they really should dig the rackets out.
And then Wimbledon is on and two weeks disappear and nobody has played any tennis at all but everyone has watched a lot of it.
It is one of the more reliable things about the British summer, alongside the weather being annoying and the BBC coverage going on slightly too long.
This year though the tennis was actually worth the attention, which is not always guaranteed.
The draw did what good draws do, which is throw up situations nobody saw coming. Jack Draper was the one everyone had pencilled in as Britain’s big hope.
He pulled out before it started, arm injury again, which if you follow him at all feels like a sentence you have read several times already.
So the British story shifted, as it tends to do, onto someone entirely unexpected.
The Draper Problem and the Fery Solution
Arthur Fery is 21. Ranked somewhere outside the top 100. On the centre court he managed to beat Grigor Dimitrov within five sets to reach the quarter finals.
Somehow the crowds are treating him like he won the whole of Wimbledon already, which is a great ego boost.
For anyone who looked at the tennis odds during the tournament, Fery was not the favourite in any match, which is either encouraging or just the nature of being an unknown 21 year old at a Grand Slam.
Elsewhere the draw had its moments. Novak Djokovic, 39, pushed through a five-setter, which feels about right for him.
Jannik Sinner has spent most of 2026 moving through tournaments with very little fuss.
Coco Gauff did manage to pass to a semi final, which required deep runs against Jessica Pegula. It took 3 sets.
Karolina Muchova did not drop a set all fortnight, which is the kind of stat that only gets mentioned when someone is about to drop a set.
A Tournament That Has Been Running Since 1877
A few things about Wimbledon that are worth knowing if you have watched it for years without thinking too hard about the details.
It has been running since 1877, which makes it the oldest tennis tournament in the world.
The roof on Centre Court that goes on and off whenever British weather does what British weather does was only put in in 2009.
Before that, rain delays were just part of the deal. The grass is kept at exactly 8mm. The balls are temperature controlled before each match.
There is an entire operation running underneath what looks like a fairly relaxed fortnight of tennis and strawberries.
Serena Williams also made her return to this year’s tournament. After 4 years of stepping away from the limelight and the 2022 US Open, her first single match managed to pull in a total of 1.8 million viewers on ESPN alone.
This tells you everything about Williams’ name, and her ongoing support, even though she had to pull out of doubles due to a knee injury.
Serena still has the crowd and Nantwich as well. Seven Wimbledon single titles, means that no one will own the court ever in the way she did.
Emma Raducanu was not in the draw this year, which disappointed anyone in the North West who has followed her since her 2021 run here that ended in a US Open title a few weeks later.
Injury again. There is a version of Raducanu’s career where everything clicks and she becomes the best women’s player Britain has produced since the 1970s and that version keeps getting delayed.
Fery carried the British flag instead and did considerably more with it than anyone expected.
The semi-finals, the finals, the whole second week, that is where Wimbledon earns its reputation every year.
BoyleSports has the tennis odds across all the major tournaments if you want to follow how the markets read the draw.
With Djokovic going deep, Sinner defending, and a British player in the last eight for the first time in a while, this was a fortnight worth actually watching rather than just having on in the background.
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