THEY'VE ROLLED the green carpet out all along the platform of Southfieids tube station to hail the arrival this morning of the 1997 All England Tennis Championships.

As one arrives back for another year of action in south west London, it's a little difficult not to be touched by the, well, Blitz spirit, shown by the city's population on these sort of occasions.

Just outside the station some are mucking in by attempting to facilitate those without tickets. Brandishing bundles of the coveted pieces of card, doubtless allocated to members struck by family illness or some other such sudden misfortune, they can get the cash-rich willing or witless in to see today's centre court play for as little as a few hundred quid.

Many residents have signs up offering their driveways, gardens, shrubberies and just about anything else they can think of as car parking spaces with rates starting at £25 a day and from there quickly going skywards. What little private land hasn't been set aside for outsiders' vehicles has been rented out to stall-holders hoping to clothe the arriving middle classes.

Yes, they go a long way around this part of the world to make their visitors feel at home.

The targeting of spectators' wallets, of course, doesn't stop at the main gate and the vast money-making machinery of the club itself has been considerably enhanced by the completion of the new number one court.

Despite having cost as much as a good-sized football stadium and its ability to hold 4,500 more people than its predecessor, the organisers are keen to play down the importance of their latest arrival. They buried two of its four storeys underground in order not to visibly challenge the venue's main arena.

Its construction has, however, been carried out with revenue very much to the fore. Its shops, restaurants and corporate hospitality areas are the main reason so many of the officials who get tearful at the mention of tradition brought themselves to point the bulldozers in the direction of its commercially impotent ancestor.

Inside it will hold 11,000 spectators, all of whom will enjoy an unobstructed view. Since work started with the removal of 100,000 cubic metres of earth from its Aorangi Hill site the task of preparing its playing surface has been quietly going on some 200 miles up the road in Yorkshire with, needless to say, soil provided from the All England club itself.

At lunchtime today, weather permitting, it will be opened by royalty, not so much the type for whom cutting ribbons is a way of life although the Duke of Kent will be there, but an impressive array of the greats who have graced these courts down through the decades. They include Maria Bueno, Rod Laver, Margaret Court, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova.

A couple of those attending will have a personal interest in this year's event with Boris Becker and Pete Sampras looking to add to their tally of three Wimbledon singles titles.

Of the two, it is the American who appears to have the better chance of title number four although both, if they can keep mind (in Sampras's case) and body (in Becker's) together are capable of coming through what looks like being a tournament dominated, perhaps like never before, by the service terrorists.

Goran Ivanisevic, Mark Philippoussis and defending champion Richard Krajicek are just three of the major power merchants aiming to trade profitably on this, the speediest of surfaces. Ivanisevic and Philippoussis have displayed some strong form of late, and the Australian beat the world number three when the pair met in the recent Queen's club final.

Yet Philippoussis faces a tricky first-round clash against Britain's in-form Greg Rusedski on centre court this afternoon while the Croatian, for his many achievements, has never successfully negotiated his way through the two weeks of a Grand Slam event.

Krajicek, meanwhile, receives the traditional men's singles champion's honour of opening the year's proceedings on centre court where Canada's Daniel Nestor will be the first to attempt to topple the Dutchman.

It was the 25-year-old's first coach, Stan Francker, who said that the only person capable of beating Krajicek at his best was Krajicek himself and certainly nobody else looks to be a serious threat to the title-holder between this afternoon's opening match and next week's quarter-finals.

Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the former French Open champion, is another player with the ability to figure in the final shake-up and, after his exit at the hands of Tim Henman 12 months ago, the Russian begins this season's campaign with what should he a straight-forward game on court number two this evening against Juan Antonio Marin of Spain.

The women's event, for a change, looks just as open. Steffi Graf's absence through injury has thrown the competition wide open with top seed Martina Hingis lacking match practice, Monica Seles battling to recover her best form against the background of her father's increasingly grave illness and third seed Jana Novotna carrying a record of big-occasion freezes into the tournament.

Beyond those three, spotting a potential winner becomes even more tricky, though. Fourth seed Iva Majoli, who lifted the title at Roland Garros, has never won a single match at Wimbledon while only one of the three women behind her in the rankings, Lindsay Davenport in 1994, has reached the quarter-finals here in, between them, a total of 18 attempts. Meanwhile, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, who might have been expected to benefit, has dropped down the seedings to eight because she is having a quite simply terrible season.

Of those seeds, Davenport, Seles and Majoli are in action today. Grabbing the most attention on day one, however, will be the appearance of the prodigies with 16-year-old Russian Anna Kournikova getting her first chance at Wimbledon to live up to the hype against America's Chanda Rubin and 17-year-old Venus Williams also scheduled to make her debut here against Magdalena Grzybowska of Poland.

It is these two players, along with Hingis who plays tomorrow, whom embody the WTA's ambitions for the coming decade. They, it is hoped, will put bums on seats, the women's game on television and, this afternoon of course, cars on the front lawns of SW19.