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With Andy Murray side-lined the Brits have very few of their own to cheer on at Wimbledon, but the evergreen Tim Henman can be guaranteed to have people on the edge of their seats. Perhaps evergreen isn’t the term to use, though, because the leaves are definitely turning brown and curling up at the edges these days. He is nearly 33 after all.

Grass, hopefully, will bring out the best of him, although the belief that it is his favourite surface is based not on reality but on the attention he has received by doing so well at the world’s most prestigious tournament. He actually likes hardcourt better.

He was dangerously close to losing to Carlos Moya at 2-4, 15-40 in the fifth set on Monday evening. And to go down to a clay-courter, one who had not played at Wimbledon since 2004, would have been very hard for anyone to accept, including Henman himself. He escaped, and the match remained a high-class thriller not only until they went to dinner leaving the score at 5-5 overnight, but when they returned on Tuesday. Henman took it 13-11 in the fifth on his seventh match point.

Don’t think that Moya just traded groundstrokes from the baseline, though, just because he prefers playing on the dirt. Henman was surprised how well Moya played against him, and believes he might have learned, ironically, from the player the Spaniard used to mentor, Rafael Nadal.

“Moya served and volleyed definitely more than I thought he was going to,” said Henman. “He served phenomenally well, so consistently, very heavy. I knew he could serve big, but he served big consistently and he was hitting his spots very well, then he was following it to the net a lot more than I thought. I think he hasn't really played a great deal on grass, so I don't know whether it was seeing Rafa play so well last year and he thought, ‘I'll give it a go’.”

While Justine Henin was inspired as a kid to win Roland Garros after a visit there with her mother, so Henman caught the Wimbledon bug early.

“I came here when I was six years old to watch the first time,” he said. “I was running around the outside courts, watching every match. I went on Centre Court. I remember those feelings. Now I'm playing. I'm at the centre of it all. There's this hill where everyone watches from, and it's Henman Hill. I mean, it is, it's sort of tough to fathom. It's been my dream. You know, today's another time when I'm out there, you know, fulfilling my dreams.”

There is so much going on at Wimbledon, any Grand Slam, in the first week that things can pass you by. You can read elsewhere how Mauresmo or Federer are doing. I’m going to tell you the story of Anna-Lena Groenefeld.

At the beginning of the year she was ranked 19, and now she’s ranked 109. She hasn’t been injured, or sick. What she did do was leave her coach, Rafael Font de Mora, at the Athletes Performance Institute in Arizona, and it appears that he took exception to that. On Tuesday she accused him of telling her opponents how to play her.

“He goes up to my opponent, and someone is coming up to me and telling me he gave them all the tactics how she had to play me today,” she revealed after losing in straight sets to 185th-ranked Nika Ozegovic.

“When you know that, it's always in your head and you just can't throw it away. I think that's just his way of dealing with it. The whole three years I worked with him I had a good relationship with him. It's sad to see that after such a long time he's like this.

“I think right now it's not about forehand and backhand, it's more about the mental part of the game. It's more dealing with the situation I'm in right now. For sure I think I will be able to play at top level again. I've seen in the past I can do it, so why can't I do it in the future? I still have a lot of years ahead of me.”