Sportsview by David Eidlestein

By dtill

TRUST Wimbledon to serve up such a slice of sporting theatre as it did on Monday. Centre Court became an amphitheatre for gladiators and tennis history was written.

With the roof closed, the air-con at full pelt and the floodlights ablaze, the world's greatest tennis tournament staged London's most dazzling night show. It was a new highlight on the capital's landscape and looked as though it had just landed from some distant planet.

How fitting that the top British player Andy Murray should have taken the starring role in the first match played entirely beneath the famous glass canopy.

His formidable opponent Stanislas Wawrinka proved more than worthy of filling the other main role as the two men produced a classic four-hour, five-set match to electrify a passionate audience. The pendulum swung back and forth and threatened to become Murray's wrecking ball.

Regular Wimbledon watchers had been here before, of course, except that past performances usually focused on Britain's former great white hope Tim Henman, stretching the fans' emotions to breaking point before, ultimately, coming up short. Murray, though, emerged triumphant if exhausted to continue the adventure.

All that was on Monday, of course, and for all I know, the Murray story may by now have been extended – or ended.

Yet so all-pervading is Wimbledon fortnight and so dramatic Murray's gateway through to the quarter-finals that it would be wrong for me to overlook it as a result of something so workaday as publishing deadlines. If subsequent events eclipsed Monday night, then so be it.

It has been the men's competition that has produced most of the fireworks thus far, despite the conspicuous absence of Rafa Nadal. Murray and Roger Federer have led the way but there has been some spectacular tennis from the likes of Lleyton Hewitt, Andy Roddick, Juan Carlos Ferrero and the giant Croatian Ivo Karlovic.

The women's section, though, seems to have lost much of its fizz, dominated as it is by so many rather colourless, muscular performers from eastern Europe.

Maria Sharapova predictably came up well short again, and while former champion Amélie Mauresmo briefly threatened a renaissance, she found herself eventually overwhelmed by the huge physicality of Russia's Dinara Safina.

Thank goodness for the Williams sisters; long live the memory of Navratilova, Hingis, Goolagong, Evert and Billie-Jean King.