The All England Club has doggedly declined to reveal how much it spent on Wimbledon’s new retractable roof but whatever it cost, even the £100m being touted, it’s a small price to pay for keeping Sir Cliff Richard away from the microphone. Congratulations, as the Peter Pan of warblers might have put it, not to mention celebrations.

However, if this year’s Centre Court spectators imagine they’re going to stay dry this year, they’d do well to think again and pack the umbrella. Whether or not he’s the finest tennis player to ever hold a racket, Roger Federer is far and away the greatest blubber of all time, and if the hallowed turf at SW19 is where he finally eclipses Pete Sampras’s record of 14 Grand Slam titles, the Duke of Kent may have to hire a pedalo to make the presentations.

The tears shed by Federer after losing the Australian Open final could have extinguished a bush fire, and they had the mops and squeegees out again in Paris when he won the French Open last week. Going past Sampras’s 14 majors, though, might even see the eclipse of tennis’s all-time record for dignitaries getting wet, which was during the 1984 Davis Cup final in Stockholm, when John McEnroe’s double-handed backhand delivered such a violent blow to the drinks container it left the King of Sweden, unwisely occupying a courtside seat, dripping with lemon barley water.

Victory for Federer at Wimbledon would reignite at least two debates. First, will the standard-issue All England Club towel be enough to absorb all the moisture? And second, will this finally settle the argument about the best ever male tennis player? The answer, in both cases, is “probably not”.

The “best ever” debate embraces not just tennis but virtually all sports. Was Pele better than Maradona? Would Marciano have ko’d Ali? Would Barry John get your vote for the best rugby fly-half of all time, or Jackie Kyle ? Only wrestling could give you a definitive answer, as the outcome of Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks would have been entirely down to the scriptwriter.

Comparing sportsmen, and sportswomen, of different eras has always been a fairly pointless exercise. How, for example, can you arrive at a decision between, say, Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher? Fangio used to drive around wearing the kind of headgear favoured by Michael Phelps or Ian Thorpe, the only difference being that Fangio could see less out of his goggles because they were covered in oil.

And every time he clipped a kerb with one of those pneumatic tyres, all the fillings would fly out of his teeth. Schumacher, by comparison, was able to vroom into a sharp bend in the knowledge that going from 180mph to 0mph in about a tenth of a second was more likely to be the result of a high-tech braking system than a large tree, or a brick wall, getting in the way.

In golf, the debate is generally between Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, who last week won Nicklaus’s own tournament, the Memorial, in his second victory since knee surgery. The US Open starts on Thursday and Woods’s quest to get within three of Nicklaus’s record of 18 major championships is looking even more probable after he finally acquired a driver that propels his golf ball onto the short grass, rather than leaving it covered in mustard after an encounter with the hot-dog stand.

Woods, apparently, has had some extra loft applied to his new driver, which is made of metal, with a head the size of a Chinese wok. Nicklaus won most of his majors with one made out of wood, and with a golf ball that came out of a wrapper and was far more prone to go sideways with a defective swing. When Maurice Bembridge, still playing the seniors tour at the age of 64, was in his prime, he got his golf balls from the pro’s shop, like everyone else, and said he counted himself lucky if he found two in his box of 12 that were approximately round.

So how can you compare golfers from one era with golfers from another? When Gene Sarazen immortalised the 15th at Augusta with an albatross, he holed his second shot with a fairway wood. Woods, when he first won the Masters in 1997, hit nothing more than a nine iron into that green.

Cricket is just about the only sport in which there is rarely an argument as to the greatest player of all time. Don Bradman’s bat was not much more than a toothpick compared with the modern railway sleepers, and if technology was still the same today, you wouldn’t find anyone hitting a six in Twenty20 cricket. Chris Gayle might, but he’d probably sustain a double hernia doing it.

Bradman would probably have scored runs in any era, as he himself clearly believed. When Australia were being battered by the then ferocious West Indies pace attack in the late 1980s, the Don — popping into the home dressing room at the close of play — was asked by Dean Jones how he thought he’d have fared against the likes of Marshall, Ambrose, Walsh and Patterson. “I think I might have averaged about 60 against their attack,” said Bradman, before adding, after a long pause, “but then again, I am nearly 80 now.” Bradman was a slightly built man, almost a midget compared with today’s players. Everyone was smaller years ago, and a tennis player like Ken Rosewall (nicknamed “Muscles” on the same principle that bald men get called “Curly”) wouldn’t have been allowed into the Wimbledon ladies’ singles for fear of him being knocked off his feet by some Russian girl’s forehand.