At times, it was like counting in a squadron of Lancaster bombers as they roared back over the horizon from all directions. Crikey, I think the old man has bought one! Thank goodness, Rusty has made it! Fancy that, JC, the old blighter, who'd have ever thought?
Some came in swooping and diving, some arrived with a crash landing and a jolt, others got lost in the storm and some are still out there somewhere, their multiple forays onto court and off court and onto court and off court sending them into a kind of Wimbledon dementia and the tournament into some kind of lugubrious farce.
Sunshine on Centre Court, rain on Court One. They were pulling the covers on one stadium and 200 yards away they were still playing in blazing sunshine. The players are developing tarpaulin fatigue.
Rafael Nadal's fourth-round match against Sweden's Robin Soderling, which was rescheduled to yesterday on Court Number One following Jelena Jankovic's tie against Marion Bartoli, should have ended on Saturday, or last month.
As the outcome hung by a thread in the fifth set, both players were asked to play a type of tennis vastly different from what they are used to. Nadal can grind in 40 degrees for over three hours, but ask him to come back six times on a dank, cool day and fire up immediately for 10 or 15 minutes.
This Wimbledon has morphed from a seven-match, Grand Slam marathon into a series of bite-sized chunks broken up by long spells of energy-sapping boredom. It has become a case of whoever explodes out of the blocks quickest wins.
All day players ran to and fro, some ending their matches between the squalls, others limping home. Lleyton Hewitt, aka Rusty, took four sets to beat Guillermo Canas, 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, while Juan Carlos Ferrero, aka JC, bagged the Serb Janko Tipsarevic in three sets, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6. Now the organisers will have to go up to his majesty's suite, shake up Roger Federer from his slumbers and tell him they finally have a quarter-final opponent, the 2003 Roland Garros champion, Ferrero.
Russia's Nikolay Davydenko also hurried to victory, over the French hope Gael Monfils, 6-3, 7-5, 6-3. They were the lucky ones. They came in to land.
After a wipe-out on Saturday and again on Monday, Nadal and Soderling arrived back yesterday to finish off their wretched match. They were level at two sets each, the Spanish second seed a service break up and 30-30 in the fifth set.
It was nicely turned for Nadal to close quickly, and normally he might have done that, but nine minutes later Soderling had broken the Spaniard. They then both served, and with Nadal leading 3-2 the rain arrived again.
Both players were, naturally, asked back when the clouds momentarily broke. And that is all the organisers were hoping for. It was a case of grabbing any time, however brief, to advance the tournament.
The two played for a further 12 minutes and with the score at 4-4 in the fifth the menacing cumulonimbus came billowing in, this time with its pals, thunder and lightning, and that was it for the day. Fractured, disjointed tennis and sensationally unhelpful weather.
It looks now like those players in the bottom half of the draw still embedded in the third and fourth rounds will have to play three days in a row.
Nadal, if he advances past Soderling, must complete a further four matches to win the final on Sunday.
There are a few players not happy about that, least of all David Nalbandian, who was beaten on Monday by Marco Baghdatis and has left for Argentina. His parting shots summed up the locker-room feeling following a tournament in which every day but one has been rain-affected. The middle Sunday, a perfect day in London, remained the rest day.
Nalbandian was asked if the decision to leave Sunday as a rest day was surprising.
"No," he said. "Always is like this. But I didn't agree. I mean nobody agrees. The bottom half has to play today, tomorrow and after tomorrow. So why? Because, anybody who takes responsibility to play all three days is going to play . . . they don't care about us."
