Wanted: suitable new graveyard for seeds. No 2 Court has normally done the job admirably. Its surface was allegedly bumpy, with the interred remains of distressed tennis talent, and the rumour was you could not play a shot deep to the baseline without seeing it cannon off the headstone of some star or other.

Moreover, folk did say that, deep in the night, when the moon was right, you would often hear the clanking of chains and the wailing of Guillermo Vilas, or similar. Seeded in the top ten and drawn to play on No 2 Court? Pack some rackets and a wreath.

Yesterday, though, No 2 Court’s reputation for horror took a sizeable dent when Martina Hingis performed a tennis-based exorcism on the place, converting it into somewhere that seeds may go not to disappear under the soil, but to rise up and return to life, had they the will to do so.

Twice in the second set, the former Wimbledon champion, a decade on from that triumph, faced match point against Naomi Cavaday, an 18-year-old British wild card equipped with a 100mph serve and some thunderous groundstrokes, who had battered her way to a first-set tie-break victory. And twice Hingis ignored the reputation of the court and her opponent’s nothing-to-lose appetite and saved herself, in the process ballooning a groundstroke heart-stoppingly close to the baseline.

Thus spared, Hingis came out and blitzed the third set 6-0. You have not seen anything less dead in a long time.

For so long, the occasion had the shape of the classic chilly narrative. Nice Swiss woman with easy smile and injured since May finds herself alone in confusing weather and, despite all sensible advice to the contrary, goes down to the basement – or, to be more specific, through No 2 Court’s side door and out on to the grass – where a mystery figure, ranked No 232, awaits her.

Hingis said that she had never seen Cavaday play. She has now. You wonder sometimes whether these young players have any respect for Wimbledon’s hallowed history. Did Cavaday not realise that, as a first-round Briton, it was her job to get blown away, in the manner of a leaf or the wrapper off a Kit-Kat? Has she not seen the script that demands that she look catastrophically out of her depth?

Evidently not. Cavaday oozed confidence until she was within a fraction of upending a champion. She credits six months of coaching from David Felgate with advancing her game to these traditionally unBritish heights. “Believe,” Felgate called out to her at one point – needlessly, one felt.

No 2 Court was doing its best. It offered wind and drizzle and the occasional baffling shaft of hot sunshine. It offered distracting babble. It offered crystal clear announcements of the scores from at least three other courts. It offered a surprising number of refreshed Australians in fright wigs and matching costumes, starting a Mexican wave before the players had reached the court.

The boisterousness of these spectators led a member of security to have a word during the knock-up. Authority at the All England Club is signalled by a blazer, an armband and a rolled umbrella. It is terrifying and the people in fright wigs were as good as gold from that moment on.

But Hingis would not be spooked. And neither, to her credit, was Cavaday afterwards, proud of the way she brought around to crisis point a set that Hingis had led 3-1 at one stage. “I didn’t bag it, or roll over,” she said. Too right. Next week she will be in the juniors. It will seem wrong.