Akh proved he once again has the lucky charm when it comes to winning Wimbledon tickets. This year he couldn’t go so I was very lucky that he offered them to me. Best thing was that it was on middle Saturday on Centre Court so not only did I not have to take a day off, we were also guaranteed some high caliber matches.

I met D fairly early so we could have a look at what was going on around the outside courts. A group of protesters in the queue, however, held us up a little bit – officials had decided to shut the gates so gate opening time was delayed for nearly an hour. I was impressed that the protesters were identified – apparently they had paint and other stuff hidden in bags to make their protest banners. This didn’t delay the start of play, however, nor dissuade anyone from visiting Wimbledon. There were sooo many people inside already by the time we made it inside the gates.

The weather, though a little bit sketchy this past week, had been clear enough that matches had been moving on schedule so as a result many of the outside courts had mostly doubles and junior matches. The biggest star that we saw, that I knew at any rate, was Tamarine Tanasugarn who was playing a doubles match. Because Wimbledon was so crowded today it was actually quite difficult to get around to many of the courts to see many other matches. Just as well D and I had our centre court tickets!

Our seats on centre court weren’t quite the last row … but they practically were! I didn’t mind though because it meant that I could come to Wimbledon. The good thing about our seats were that we were sat with a view of the Royal Box – and today a whole heap of sports starts were in the box including Martina Navratilova, Sir Steve Redgrave, Dame Kelly Holmes, Jonathan Edwards, Sachin Tendulkar, Sir Roger Bannister, Amy Williams (won gold at the Winter Olympics if you don’t know) and a whole host of rugby, football and cricket stars. We were also marking Armed Forces Day so there were 14 members of the armed forces, nominated for exceptional service, in the box.

Three matches on Centre court for us today. First up was women’s number one seed Caroline Wozniacki who defeated Aussie Jarmila Gajdosova fairly handily but I must say that I felt that Jarmila lost the match more than Caroline won it. Though Caroline had some good shots – it was Jarmila who was going for everything. Unfortunately her unforced errors outweighing her winners meant she went down … but at least she went down fighting.

Next up on court was Roger Federer who outclassed David Nalbandian. Roger was just pure class and it was great to see him so comfortable in his element. There is just such an ease to his game and its like he can just turn the power or touch on just like that.

And yes, there were the shirt taking off moments too …

Final game of the match was Novak Djokovic (the number two seed this year) against Marcos Baghdatis. I really find it hard to like Novak. In today’s match he came across a spoilt little boy, he even broke his racquet! Nice butt though …

Marcos did well to keep up with Novak but the actually game wasn’t the kind of match that was very entertaining even if it was quite a close one. There were lots of long drawn out and often unexciting rallies. D and I left at the end of the third set!