A crucial decision to which we perhaps do not pay sufficient heed: where to stay? For most of her glory years here at the All England Club, Steffi Graf used to rent a house two minutes’ walk away. When she left SW19 for good, her annual Wimbledon residence was snapped up by Mikhail Youzhny, although pretty soon he got hacked off that the Midas touch was utterly failing to rub off and, after a couple of poor years in Graf Towers, he thought of going back instead to his previous temporary home in Chelsea.

But after yesterday’s 7-5, 7-6, 6-3 third-round win against Jarkko Nieminen, of Finland, Youzhny said that he is there to stay. His landlady was also pleased with his work, although by the court yesterday she was astonished to discover that her smiling Russian lodger has been hiding a fearful temper.

And his is no cold, brooding, stereotypically Eastern bloc streak of anger; it is full voice and very animated. Thank heavens, then, that she was not party to the English translation.

Why is all this important? Because on the road to the Wimbledon final, we have encountered all facets of personality that go towards making a winner. Readers of this series will know the characters we have met along the way: at the qualifying competition in Roehampton, southwest London, a fortnight ago we started with James May, the Briton who was a really decent guy and will probably detest the description. His conqueror was pretty decent, too, but thereafter we have found personalities more churned up by the emotional examination of a Wimbledon singles match.

That is not to say what does and does not make a winner. In its pomp as a global sport, tennis could not have delivered two extremes farther apart than Björn Borg and John McEnroe.

However, Youzhny anchored himself at the McEnroe end of the scale yesterday and it did not seem to do him any damage at all. The main target of his outbursts, however, was a rather gentle, elderly man beside the court who happens to be his coach. This is Boris Sopkin, who is a retired professor of mathematics at Moscow Technical University and seems far too nice to be away from home playing sponge to Youzhny’s angst.

Youzhny insisted that his anger was directed at himself, not his coach, and that Sopkin happened to be the only person there with whom he could communicate his frustration. “There were some other Russian people there,” he said afterwards. “But I didn’t know them. And my landlady was there but I could not go and shout at her.”

In any case, Sopkin said he sympathised. He has been with Youzhny since 1993, when he was 11, and he is well versed in the business of anger-management. Oher Russian speakers by the court insisted that, on the whole, the blasphemies were rare but well-chosen. And the fact that the umpire was James Keothavong, the brother of Anne and thus British, explains why they appeared to have zipped by so completely undetected.

Almost the only words that Youzhny did share with Keothavong were “net, nice. Wimbledon tournament, nice” and he did not deliver them as if he meant them. His gripe with the nets here was that he was on the wrong end of four net cords, two in the same game, and he does not believe that they are sufficiently taut. With Wimbledon in general, he merely echoes the chorus: it is cold and wet out there and hard to do a job.

There are players out there, of course, whose tennis can rise to the challenge when driven by anger and frustration, none more so than the aforementioned McEnroe. Youzhny’s most celebrated moment in tennis came five years ago in the fifth and deciding rubber of the Davis Cup final against France when he came back from two sets down against Paul-Henri Mathieu to win the cup.

The victory came shortly after the death of his father and while it is too cute to suggest that emotional turmoil inspired his victory, it certainly shows that he can handle bad times as well as good.

But when it comes to the frustrations of this rain-bothered tournament, Graf Towers really is the business. While other players are victims of the weather, frustrated and bored in the locker-room, Youzhny just walks home and relaxes. The minute he hears the covers are coming off, he heads back. “For Steffi it was lucky,” he said. “Maybe it can be for me, too.”

Path to glory

Qualifying event

Monday, June 18

James May (GB) bt Lukas Lacko (Slovakia) 6-4, 6-3

Tuesday, June 19

Sam Warburg (US) bt May 6-3, 6-4

Thursday, June 21

Warburg bt Kevin Kim (US) 2-6, 7-6, 6-2, 6-1

First round, Tuesday, June 26

Florian Mayer (Ger) bt Warburg 6-4, 6-2, 6-2

Second round, Thursday, June 28

Jarkko Nieminen (Fin) bt Mayer 3-6, 6-3, 7-6, 2-6, 6-3

Third round, yesterday

Mikhail Youzhny (Russ) bt Nieminen 7-5, 7-6, 6-3