Mahut and Isner

I was going to praise John Terry's extraordinary attempt at a defensive diving header yesterday, but much more derring-do was happening over at Wimbledon.

In case this passed you by, at 1pm yesterday Nicolas Mahut and John Isner strolled onto court to complete the fifth set of their match. Over 8 hours later they had to stop for bad light with the score level at 59-59. I won't list every record broken because the two most remarkable things are that they didn't have a single injury time-out, and the one and only comfort break didn't happen until 8pm.

In a world where kids seem to partake of sport neatly packaged up into discrete one hour activities, it was great to see the equivalent of a couple of kids playing from dawn to dusk until their mums called them in for their tea.

John Isner looked delirious come the end. He was moving with the speed and grace of Frankenstein's monster. Mahut was probably the greater hero though. He had to serve second throughout, so was always serving to stay in the match, and amazingly only had to save three match points over all that time, which dealt a blow to one of my longest-held prejudices - that the French are the biggest bunch of sporting chokers and quitters on the planet.

The match was nearly as amazing as the time a few years ago, when Pete Davies and I played pat-a-cake at Park Hill tennis courts in Croydon from 10am until 2:30pm, at which point, deadlocked at 13-13 in the last set, we agreed on a gentlemanly draw, and a crawl to Pret a Manger where we treated ourselves to a couple of double-fat locochocaloca frappuccinos and the Polish serving wenches to our taut and fragrant bodies.

There's a short story about a penalty shoot-out going on for infinity. I love the idea of something similar happening here....

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