Wimbledon Wet Fever

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to have been invited over to London for our Company’s Summer BBQ and since we had nothing planned for the Friday evening my wife suggested we try go down to Wimbledon and hope that we would be lucky to find tickets for the afternoon sessions, given it was raining and we knew many spectators would have either not turned up or left the venue.

So, following a quick and brief visit to our London office to say hello to my colleagues, we took the tube and headed down to Wimbledon. After a 45 minute ride we arrived at Southfields and upon exiting the station we realised it was raining so we jumped in a taxi and headed to Wimbledon. The ride in the rain gave us some hope that we would be somehow lucky, and in fact upon arriving outside the main entrance there were hundreds of spectators leaving the grounds. We immediately asked one of the stewards how we could somehow get tickets and he directed us to the queue gate but didn’t indicate we would be lucky. So we set off again in the rain and went back down to where the taxi had previously dropped us off, around 500 metres away and entered gate 10 and headed to the queue, where a Steward gave us a couple of tickets and greeted us by saying that luck wasn’t probably on our side today. Luckily a very nice chap standing behind us told us not to move as they would not send us away if we’re only a few people waiting in the rain to try get in, and rightly so after an hour waiting and ending up slightly drenched we were told they’d let us in so we all dashed towards the entrance and for a fraction of the price we managed to get in to the Wimbledon grounds.

The emotion of entering the gate and walk on the grounds, seeing the majestic court 1 and centre court from the outside, had my heart pumping more than when we ran towards the queue gate earlier, and although my wish was to hopefully make it to the centre court to watch my favourite player Sinner play against Kecmanovic the fact of having made it was already a great achievement. We then headed straight to the ticket resale booth, however after having registered online and waited anxiously for an hour, seated on the hill on a plastic sheet to protect us from the wet lawn, we shared a couple of pints and happily watched Sinner win his round 32 match on the Big Screen together with a small number of spectators who like us were probably wet from head to toe. We were so happy and also lucky to have met Adrian who not only helped us keep our hopes high and remain in the queue, but most of all led us to achieve our goal and enter the Wimbledon Tennis grounds to ultimately experience ‘The Hill’ on a wet Friday afternoon, without any regrets, and will definitely do it again!