WIMBLEDON’S beautifully manicured grass courts are a quintessential element of the historic tennis tournament. But their days are numbered, according to two of the best-known names of British tennis.

David Lloyd, the former captain of the British Davis Cup team, said that the All England Club should rip up the turf and replace lawns with concrete. His comments struck a chord with Sue Barker, the BBC Wimbledon presenter, who said: “The grass will eventually go.”

Some highly ranked players are vocal about their hatred of the surface and have threatened to boycott Wimbledon. Maintaining the lawns at their perfect 8mm height is a year-round job requiring a tonne of seed, six million pints of water and 14 groundsmen, who would be made redundant if the grass were dug up.

The Australian and US Opens switched to hard courts in the 1970s. “The US Open and Australian Open championships get the best games, you get a better standard of tennis at those,” Mr Lloyd said. “A championship as good as Wimbledon is not great because it is played on grass, but because it is a great tournament with aura and tradition. That is the fallacy that they need to get past. If the grass went that would not change. It might be greater if they got rid of the grass.”

Sue Barker, the French Open winner who is the perennial face of Wimbledon for the BBC, also believes that Wimbledon will lose its grass courts. When asked in a magazine called Sue Barker’s Wimbledon if she thought it was time to dig up the lawns, she said: “I’m sure the grass will go eventually, because there are fewer tournaments on grass and it is not a popular surface.”

Alex Corretja is among those who have shunned the competition and André Agassi once said: “After my first time here I swore I’d never come back. I didn’t have any desire to be on grass and was convinced it was a surface I couldn’t do well on.”

Eddie Seaward, chief groundsman at Wimbledon for 15 years, said: “There would be an outrage from the general public, grass is what makes Wimbledon unique. It is more a part of Wimbledon than strawberries and cream.”

Tim Phillips, chairman of the All England Club, said: “Wimbledon has always striven to provide the players with the best possible grass courts on which to display their considerable talents. Just as the game of tennis does not stand still, neither do we and we continue to prepare our courts using all our experience and the latest technology.”

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RAIN OR SHINE
By Paul Simons

ALTHOUGH the forecasts for the first week of Wimbledon look quite promising, the Wimbledon fortnight rarely escapes rain:

1922 The championships were plagued by rain every day and had to squelch into a third week. The most disrupted championship in history

1982 The wettest Wimbledon, in terms of the sheer quantity of rain, about 3½ times the average amount for two weeks in mid-summer

1985 In the second week, the Met Office’s new rainfall radar revealed an approaching cloudburst. The groundsmen managed to cover the courts and 15 minutes later 40mm (1.5in) of rain fell in just 20 minutes, swamping the spectators and players’ tunnels leading on to the Centre Court with 2ft of water.

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