Queues and Qs: Life at Wimbledon’s middle Sunday

The Centre Court grass is 902 square metres but Wimbledon is boundless. Step into the upper air of Southfields, and you are met with purple and green bunting, bedecked shopfronts and tuk-tuks that carry you the six-minute ride to the tennis for £15. A planned expansion of 38 new courts and an 8,000-seater stadium says it all. Wimbledon is a great white covered in remoras. Message to the locals: hitch a ride or get eaten.

It is a steaming Sunday at Wimbledon and there is an energy. Some have the bewildered look of people staying up for England versus Mexico, others have sunstroke, and it isn’t easy to distinguish between the two. But, of course, we are not all in it together. Not really. Those in natty linen glide straight to the gates and shade. Queuers stand in line with a ticket towards a ticket. And let that be our metaphor for today’s fourth round match between Novak Djokovic and Roman Safiullin. Djokovic is a 24-time major winner on a stage where he has spent hundreds of hours. Safiullin is an unseeded journeyman with no career titles who belongs to the outside courts. He is also a man with a single letter by his name: Q.

There’s a reason why it is natural to root for qualifiers at Wimbledon. They have an unknowability. They give us the feeling, perhaps in the way their clothes hang off them, that they have seen things. That they have had to go to places that the seeds do not. Between September and February, Safiullin nursed an injury so severe that he thought he might never recover. Today was still his 41st match of the year, having bounced between Oeiras, Thionville and other ATP outposts. This is simply what you have to do to maintain or improve on your ranking points, generally a pre-requisite of getting into a major tournament. Djokovic was playing in his 18th.

That disparity, an inequality on top of other inequalities, is why Safiullin found himself two sets down, flat on his back in a medical timeout. A strawberry in the sun, with an audience licking their lips. But this can be a place of miracles. Safiullin is here after all, a qualifier on centre court in the fourth round, with another qualifier, Shintaro Mochizuki, scheduled to play Jannik Sinner later. 

Something shifts. Safiullin wins the third set. In the sunny seats, hundreds of hand fans, built for another purpose, flap in delight. Maybe there is not a chasm between these two men? Maybe it is all in a flick of a wrist. The flight of a serve.

The crowd allows itself to believe for a moment: what if he wins a fourth and a fifth set, against a man who has won more grand slam singles matches than anyone else in history? A tanned robot, taut and lean, even at 39, beaten by a man with a shirt two sizes too big? 

Except that is just a fantasy. The third set is a brief diversion and 20 minutes later Safiullin is down in the fourth with a bag of ice held to his temple. In short order, he has lost. Djokovic is in fine form. So that’s it for another year. Safiullin hitched a ride but he has been eaten. He better leave now. Naomi Osaka is here and she’s wearing a kimono.

Photograph by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images