Anyone can win a tennis tournament. Anyone can win loads of grand slams. Well, when I say ‘anyone’, I mean those who play the game even more betterer than wot I do. And possibly speak better English too. And here’s two guys who have won way more than ‘their fair share’ of tournaments. Possibly more than anyone, if you don’t count: miseries, Serbs and Covid-risks. Because for more than a decade all the major tournaments have been won by those three, and a couple by Andy Murray (see: ‘miseries’, above). So they all played in a tennis tournament at the O2 in Greenwich last week and there were many photos of the Fab Four. With Andy Murray definitely ‘Ringo’.

And then I saw this photo in today’s paper. And I cried. Quite literally, I had tears in my eyes which fortunately precluded me from reading all the bad news which surrounded it.

Because not everyone can be a big enough man to cry in public and hold another man’s hand for comfort. They lost a doubles match. But they weren’t crying about that. Only real tossers, wooses, the feeble-minded and losers do that. These two monsters of their sport were crying about The End. The end of the era. Roger’s last match and who knows whether Rafa will play more, having magnificently limped his way to winning Wimbledon this summer after endless injuries. Djokovic and Murray simply don’t count. The first no one likes and the second was just not quite big enough to be an equal. A true ‘great’. Only a British great because we calibrate greatness differently. Properly. But maybe, quite soon, Novak and Andy can share a man-crush moment of their own.

Meanwhile, I shall just enjoy this shared moment. It’s not like footballers hugging and kissing after a goal. Firstly, this is raw and that is just following the guidelines, plus the fact that they’ll all probably be trousering another 50 grand for that goal.

This is what true greatness looks like.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx