THE sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, has rounded on Britain’s top tennis players after their almost total capitulation once again in the first round at Wimbledon. It is not really good enough, he pronounced, and there are dark hints that players might receive less financial support from the government in future.

Gerry seems to be infected by that horrible “Team GB” gung-ho nationalism that we witnessed in Beijing last year, in which the sole point of supporting participation in sport is to watch Brits humiliate foreigners and punch the air on the podium while barking out the national anthem and later invading Poland. Such an attitude is fine in culturally primitive countries, such as Australia, but it seems a little unbecoming in an ancient liberal democracy like ours. Does it matter that Britain’s gels are not as good at tennis, or shot-putting, as some gargantuan, sweating, mustachioed Slav? Perhaps our gels have better things to do with their time.

Much of the ridicule was heaped upon poor Alex Bogdanovic, who lost in straight sets as usual and then said he thought he’d played quite well, really. Watching Bogdanovic succumb brought to mind Betjeman’s poem A Subaltern’s Love Song, except with amendment: “Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy/The speed of a wardrobe, the strength of a boy”. But that’s unfair. I suppose Bogdanovic will be upset that he let Sutcliffe down, much as we all would be; but he seems a likeable and well-adjusted young man, so he should recover quickly.

However, let’s assume that Sutcliffe is in tune with the population, and that we really are sufficiently childish to insist that the measure of our nation can be seen in the regularity with which our sportsmen and women whup the ass of ghastly foreigners. Is it our top-ranking tennis players who are to blame that we do not?

Look down the rankings of British players and leave that surly, growling anomaly Andrew Murray aside for a moment. Leave aside, too, the Serb, Bogdanovic, and the Ukrainian, Elena Baltacha, because they are not really British at all, if we’re honest. Now, check out the Christian names of the rest. For the boys: Joshua, Jonathan, Richard, Christopher, James. For the girls? Anne, Katie, Georgie, Naomi and Emily (that’ll be Emily Webley-Smith, then). These are — how can I put it? — names of a certain marque. They sound like the cast of an exciting new Enid Blyton adventure, The Famous Five Get Stuffed In Straight Sets On An Outside Court. Where are the Jases, the Lynvals, the Delroys, the Chardonnays, the Kylies? This is a generalisation, but the names signify something. They suggest to me that the overwhelming majority of our top tennis players are drawn from a fairly small community. The southern English upper middle class.

This is not an original thesis — that tennis in Britain is a middle-class pastime. But in a way, that’s the point: the fact that we have known this for decades and nothing has been done about it. Something was meant to have been done about it, but the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) has failed utterly to take the sport into our state schools; it has failed to engage with the great mass of British kids. And it is the LTA that should be the focus of Sutcliffe’s pique, rather than the players — who have, after all, done the best they can.

A solution might be to bypass the LTA entirely and pour the funding into an independent network of tennis coaches (who, when you talk to them, express a fierce loathing for the snobbishness and conservatism of the LTA). I suspect working-class kids would enjoy tennis if they were given a chance to play it. I would have enjoyed it enormously, but I was 25 before I stepped on to a court. That’s the problem.

My point, incidentally, is not that we are useless at tennis, in general, because the middle classes are useless at sport. Quite the reverse, in a way; our top players do rather well to compete against the best of Russia and Spain and America when drawn from such a shallow pool of talent.

And I have to say, I admire Bogdanovic’s quiet, measured dignity in defeat, much as I admired Tim Henman’s (I knew there was a Blyton Christian name missing from that list!) good-natured perseverance in the face of goading and bitter recrimination from an hysterical media every June for a decade. But more than any sport except, perhaps, football, tennis is at its most compelling when you are playing it, rather than watching it — and it would be nice if the rest of the country could get in on the act somehow.