Were it not enough to be dispatched in straight sets by an outsider in the Wimbledon quarterfinals, Tim Henman was waking up on Thursday to a near-unanimous press verdict that he will now never win his home tournament.
”Exit Henman as title dream dies,” was the main sports headline of The Times newspaper, one of the kinder summings-up of the sole British tennis hope’s 7-6, 6-4, 6-2 defeat to unseeded Croatian Mario Ancic.
Henman is now approaching 30, an age at which tennis players generally begin to decline, and the papers saw this year’s campaign as his final chance to become the first Briton in 68 years to win the Wimbledon men’s singles title.
”End of the line for Tim,” sighed the Daily Mail, adding, in reference to the English football team’s recent last-eight exit at Euro 2004: ”So, are we now just a nation of quarterfinalists?”
Other papers also saw Henman’s defeat as the final straw in a deeply disappointing summer for English sport, which saw the world champion rugby union side crushed by Australia and the national cricket team struggle badly.
The Sun, Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper, ran a mugshot of Henman next to similar ones of the captains of the football, cricket and rugby union teams, David Beckham, Michael Vaughan and Lawrence Dallaglio.
”GUILTY … of crimes against English sport fans,” ran the banner headline on the back page, while a sports writer railed at Henman’s ”heartbreaking but hopeless performance”.
”We all roared our hearts out for him, but once again Tim really bottled it when it really mattered,” The Sun said in a scathing editorial comment. ”What a toothless tiger.”
Fellow tabloid the Daily Mirror used a similar theme, advising sports fans to transfer their loyalties to a true British world-beater, women’s marathon record-holder Paula Radcliffe.
There were some words of kindness, however, from The Times‘s chief sports writer, who urged detractors to remember that Henman had reached the quarterfinals or better at Wimbledon an amazing eight times.
”Let us call Henman a winner, because that is what he is,” Simon Barnes wrote.
”There was a time when people used to say that Henman was ‘due a bad Wimbledon’, but they have given up. Henman doesn’t do bad Wimbledons.”
However this constant near-success is the real problem, opined Boris Johnson, a Conservative lawmaker and magazine editor, in a column for the Daily Telegraph.
Every year with ”metronomic regularity” fans are caught up in the fuss and began to believe that this could be Henman’s tournament — only to have their hopes dashed.
”In its formality, its ritual, the Henman exit is like the chiming of Big Ben or the Changing of the Guard, and whatever they say about Britain today, we can still run a ceremony like clockwork,” Johnson wrote.
”Goodbye Tim, and see you next year!” — Sapa-AFP