Wimbledon 97: Hingis and Co highlight the generation gap

Richard Edmondson watches the women do battle on court and finds the young ones victorious

Women's tennis is different from men's tennis and there is one school of thought that the cohesion and methodology of the distaff version makes it the greater spectacle. Certainly it is true to say that if a point gets as far as a successful service return in the men's game it qualifies as a rally.

Further differences involve the reportage. One caveat your noble observer receives from on high exclusively about the women's game is to avoid sexism. This is a silly request as how could anyone be chauvinistic about those sweet little girls in their pretty frocks?

Martina Hingis is finding that with the territory of No 1 come questions with little immediate pertinence to her game. These include weight, boyfriends but not, as yet, the weight of her boyfriends.

The Swiss miss hardly helped her cause yesterday by wearing a dress that appeared half a size too small and struggled to contain what the scamps in my form used to refer to as thunder thighs. The apparel also seemed to be cutting off the circulation to Hingis's racket arm as she toiled uneasily against a qualifier, Anne Kremer.

It would be easy to report that the woman from Luxembourg was playing her own nerves as much as anything else yesterday and this was a contest of Kremer versus Kremer, but that would betray the truth. Hingis was initially too static and too rusty on grass, and it took some time before the WD40 started working on the way to a 6-4, 6-4 victory.

Sunday morning fuzzyheads should not be surprised, incidentally, if they think they see the world No1 on Wimbledon Common this Sunday morning. if she survives the first week, Hingis plans metaphorically to get back on the bike and actually get on a horse, despite the fact it was an equine accident that forced her out of the game for six weeks earlier this year.

Hingis is operating in days when the age of a good female player appears to be the same as a bad hand of pontoon. She is 16, the same age as her former junior rival Anna Kournikova, who also won yesterday.

Kournikova, who is not the ugliest figure on the tour, was up against Chanda Rubin, 21, who is no ogress herself. This factor presumably explained why the contest pitched up on Centre Court, as their respective rankings were none too dramatic.

Since the early 1990s Kournikova and her parents, who are Russian, have been wined and dined in the swankiest New York restaurants by agents seeking ink on a contract. The player is the natural heiress to Gabriela Sabatini as the face the advertisers seek. The most striking feature of Kournikova yesterday though was a plaited ponytail of such length and constituency that it could probably keep the QEII at quayside.

Players have to keep their wits about them for far longer than the final point these days, and it was no different for Kournikova yesterday. "Is your boyfriend, Sergei, here?" asked one inquisitor confidently in the press conference. "I'm single," she replied. "You're not going out with him?" "I'm single".

The Russian admitted she was nervous playing her first match at the championships in its premier crucible, but that her confidence had been fed as the match progressed. This was hardly surprising as Rubin was serving trolley-loads of sustenance over the net.

They have had a Chanda Rubin Day in her home town of Lafayette, Louisiana. Yesterday, at Wimbledon, they held a Chanda Rubin nightmare. The American participated in the longest women's match in the championships (58 games against Patricia Hy-Boulais in 1995), but the marathon woman did not detain us long yesterday. It took 43 minutes to occupy a 6-1, 6-1 scoreline.

The court environment is more than familiar to the family Rubin as the patriarch, Edward, is a district judge. Amanda Coetzer, too, has a lawyer father, and he may have been of some use to the family of the woman she has beaten three times this season, Steffi Graf.

There is a wanted poster in the All England complex featuring Coetzer as a character "who may be hazardous to your ranking". Her aliases are given as Little Assassin, Speedy Gonzalez and Quicksilver - she never considers a point dead and would chase the ball into a snake pit.

Yesterday, she put her little legs to good use against Alex Fusai of France. Their contest had been suspended overnight at 6-6 in a first tie- break, which was rather like being left in the electric chair while the battery was being recharged.

Coetzer lost only one further game as she assembled a 7-6, 6-1 win, in the process leaping around like the national animal motif of her native South Africa. Coetzer generates surprising power from a 5ft 2in frame, lending the impression of an ant dragging a twig back to the communal hill. She is an example to all of what can be achieved in the Jurassic Park zone of the 27th year of female tennis player's life.