GREATER love hath no tennis player than that he should help a potential future opponent in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon from a burning building. Unfortunately for Sjeng Schalken, the charity of Andy Roddick has its limits and no further lifelines were extended yesterday when the No 2 seed from the United States defeated the No 10 seed from the Netherlands in three sets, 7-6, 7-6, 6-3.

The two men were playing for the first time since that Saturday afternoon in May, when a fire started in the Parco dei Principe hotel in Rome and Roddick offered Schalken, his wife and numerous other guests sanctuary on his balcony. Mr and Mrs Schalken leapt from the floor above on to Roddick’s swiftly tendered mattress — the sort of thing that players used to get up to all the time in the Seventies, but which these days only happens in cases of emergency.

Yesterday’s quarter-final was fiery in its own way, but this time Roddick pushed Schalken aside and jumped out of the window himself, leaving his opponent behind to chew on the smoke. As ever, Roddick’s serve was the critical self-rescue tool. Some of his serving yesterday was so furious, and flew by with such force, it had Schalken looking nervously behind him for the backdraft. That short-sprung, vertical-launch service action is over so fast one is barely prepared for the devastation it unleashes and it was a toss-up, on many occasions, whether Schalken was playing a stroke or simply using his racket to defend himself against critical damage to a significant organ.

Eyes were drawn to the speedometers in the corners of the court. Yesterday Roddick was beaming down serves regularly at 138 and 139mph and he took it all the way up to 145mph at the start of the seventh game. That’s shy of the record 153mph he set at Queen’s last month, but it’s still too hot to handle for most players and almost too hot to watch. Indeed, watching Roddick on grass is a little like gathering round at one of those test-your-strength fairground games with the mallet and the pole.

Maybe the All England Club should go the whole way and put a bell in the on-court speedo, set to ding at speeds of 142mph and over. Fun for all the family! Except, of course, Schalken’s. He’s not one of the professional circuit’s more dynamic pleasure-takers at the best of times, but yesterday, as lasting answers to Roddick’s barrage failed him, Schalken’s brow was furrowed deeply. The skittering and shirt-plucking of Roddick contrasts vividly with Schalken’s, slow, meditative comings and goings. You have seen the umpire’s chair move faster than Schalken does between points. Sometimes the ball gets 16 bounces before he reconciles himself to the idea of serving with it. He appears to be pacing himself for a burst of explosive action — but at some point in 2008.

In fact, at 6ft 4in, and seldom bending, the Dutchman would, if laid on his side, make for a handy dyke. He’s about as hard to get round, too. Two of yesterday’s three resolute, if slightly processional, sets went to tie-breaks. Indeed, rain breaks were outnumbering service breaks by two to none until Roddick hit a forehand pass in the sixth game of the third set to open the decisive gap.

The first set took place against a background of Last-Night-of-the-Proms-style hooting from Henman Hill, which now fulfils for No 1 Court the role of chief concentration-wrecker, hitherto played by passing aeroplanes. We saw 11 games in that first set without a break of serve or even a sniff of one, before Roddick reached advantage in the twelfth. He couldn’t make it stick, but he did the predictable damage in the tie-break, even after unhelpfully burdening himself by serving a double fault on the opening point.

The second set saw Schalken briefly holding the hen’s tooth, which is a break point against the Roddick serve, but the American was always able to clobber his way out of trouble, and not just in the service. The power with which he punishes any shot with undue air in it, in one, radically compressed jump-and-swat manoeuvre, draws gasps of amazement from the crowd — gasps that can sometimes seem to contain moral disapproval, as if Roddick were using the racket to bludgeon Schalken or offending in some other way against 100 years of etiquette and tradition.

And to think he looks so cute, too — like someone who has recently gone solo from a globally successful boy band. Roddick now faces Mario Ancic, the unseeded Croat who vanquished Henman, and, if I were Ancic, I’d be checking the fire exits. Schalken, meanwhile, departs looking a little singed at the edges. Still, he got out alive.