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Thank heavens colour television was up and running in Britain when we had our last Wimbledon singles winner.

Virginia Wade it was, 41 years ago to be precise (and if memory serves she was wearing a cardigan at the time. Plus ca change.)

British tennis doesn’t have to suffer the indignity heaped upon fans who have to watch black and white TV clips to relive the last time we won anything big in soccer — the 1966 World Cup.

The flickering images accompanying Kenneth Wolstenholme’s famous “they think it’s all over,” line look like something from an early moon lander nowadays and just ram home the fact that it was all so long ago. Viewers of the 1977 women’s final, complete with Dan Maskell’s rapturous “Oh, I say, Virginias,”  could at least see that Wade’s cardigan was pink.

But even so, our losing streak at the All England Lawn Tennis Club must have broken all kinds of laws of averages. Surely a nation of so many millions should statistically have thrown up another men’s champion by now instead of us having to look back to Fred Perry in 1936.

Its dismal failure to do so, despite some worthy efforts in the 1960s, perhaps in part explains why the cheery Wimbledon crowds and their determination to get behind the British players come in for so much sneering. With their “Henmania” and now, apparently, their “Andymonium,” they represent the triumph of hope over experience and, as such, an easy target — like flat-Earth believers. 

They should not take the stick lying down. They should point out that even if we can’t win it, the world still regards Wimbledon as the greatest tennis tournament and one that, for all its inbuilt snobbery, still lets people in without pre-booked tickets at reasonable turnstile prices and refuses to sell out to advertisers by splattering the court surrounds with hoardings and logos.

They should remind the knockers too that the world’s best players want to take part so much that they leave behind their fancy coloured gear and grudgingly conform to the tournament’s “predominantly white” clothes rule, even at the risk of making some of them look like ordinary public court hackers.

There are reasons to be cheerful, the tennis pendulum will swing back our way from eastern Europe one day – and before global warming has turned the lawns of SW19 into dust, there will be another British champion.

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