Edmund Hartley

My tennis education came from a grandmother who refused to miss a minute of Wimbledon and a battered radio that carried the overseas Slams into the small hours. I was drawn to the loneliness of it — two players, no substitutes, nowhere to hide — and to how much hidden complexity sits beneath that simplicity once you start paying attention to surface, conditions and the toll of a long fortnight. When I break down a match, the ranking is where I begin, not where I land. I want to know how a player actually moves on the surface in front of them, how many hard sets are sitting in their legs from earlier rounds, what the head-to-head really says, and whether a draw has quietly drained someone before they've even walked on court. Two players can carry near-identical numbers and effectively play different sports. Six years of writing this has made me wary of short-priced favourites in best-of-three, where one tight tiebreak can flip the whole thing. I prefer to set my reasoning out plainly and let the reader weigh it rather than pretend tennis bends to prediction more than it does. — Edmund Hartley