Tennis is on at the moment, Wimbledon and all that. I rarely find myself consistently rooting for a single team or person in any sporting event that I watch. Probably due to my inconsistency in watching, if I find myself close to a television with a rugby match on I’ll catch it but I don’t go out of my way to follow every match Wales plays, even during the highly publicized Six Nations, although big events do encourage, in me at least, a more proactive effort to watch play. So my choice and interest this year of which match to watch at Wimbledon and which to simply let slip by, largely rests upon which players I liked watching last year, Lisicki being one that’s going on right now. From last Wednesday’s match between Stepanek and Djokovic, the resilience and determination shown by Stephanek ensures that when he next appears at Wimbledon (assuming of course that he does), I shall gravitate towards his matches when I see them on the schedule. Which brings me to my next point, any match of tennis requires such a huge time investment to watch, with matches ranging from anything around an hour to three or in some cases a hell of a long longer. The shorter the match is, the more predictable the outcome, a match that’s over quickly is one in which one player dominates the other, so you find yourself more attracted to the closer competitions where both sides do their utmost to avoid losing a single point while scoring for themselves. It is this reason that tennis at it’s best is utterly captivating for me, we’re not talking about a sport where one player is guaranteed to wipe the floor with their competitors, at the very top it’s a bloody pantheon, with no clear Zeus or Hera to claim dominance but rather each player heavily and violently contests the mantle to attain, temporarily at best, the crown.