Wimbledon has proved to me that You’ve Gotta Be In It To Win It as by some miracle I won tickets in the Wimbledon ballot again! This year I got tickets for the first Thursday of the Championship on Court 1. Pat hasn’t ever visited Wimbledon so I gave him first right of refusal and even though he had to take a day off from work to attend he didn’t hesitate in snapping up my plus one.

Interestingly the Queen must have also heard that I was going today as she made a special effort to attend Wimbledon after 33 yeas of non-attendance! How exciting that I got to see her again after only having seen her at Royal Ascot a couple of weeks ago 😉

I love how in the second picture of the Queen there is some woman who is right up in her face with her camera!

I’m not sure if it’s the extended good weather we’ve had this summer, or the Queen’s visit or even people returning to see the end of what turned out to be the longest match in the world when John Isner defeated Nicolas Mahut 6-4, 3-6, 6-7(7), 7-6(3), 70-68 (it lasted 11 hours, 5 minutes!) but Wimbledon was absolutely heaving this year – people were everywhere and after we saw the Queen and a brief visit to Court 18 to watch a couple of games of Agnieszka Radwanska’s match (number 7 seed) we were very happy to retire to our seats on Court 1 for the rest of the day.

The first match up on Court 1 featured two good looking gals on the women’s tour: Ioana Olaru and, who doesn’t know, Maria Sharapova. I never realised quite how tall Maria is – she simply towered over her opponent.

It was Maria through rather handily in two sets 6-1 6-4.

Next up were two men’s matches. The first between the number six seed Robin Soderling and Marcel Granoller. In a fairly straight-forward match Soderling was though in straight sets.

Then next up was Sam Querrey (the 18th seed) and Ivan Dodig. This match proved to have a bit more fight it in but Pat and I actually got a bit antsy (and hungry) and left before it finished. It was a good tactic as we avoided most of the crowds and were soon sitting in front of a nice rack of ribs for dinner. Mmmm ….

Its a shame we didn’t get to see our own Aussie Sam Stosur play – just on the practice courts …