Jonas Bjorkman and Wayne Arthurs

Tennis players start so young that they’re almost ready to turn pro before they’ve taken the teat off their changeover water bottle, so it’s pretty rare to get into the second week of a Grand Slam tournament and witness a match between a couple of chaps who’ve been around so long they almost go back to the days of wooden rackets and Fred Perry trousers.

Jonas Bjorkman and Wayne Arthurs may have had to explain to their escort guards as they left the locker room on Monday that they were due on Court 3 for a men’s third-round singles match, rather than competitors in the recently introduced ‘wheelchair gentlemen’s invitation doubles’.

Bjorkman, at 35, is three years older than Tim Henman, and Arthurs, at 36, has been past his sell-by date for so long he’s been relegated from the main section of the players’ handbook to the appendix, sandwiched between Yves Allegro and George Bastle.

It was, therefore, not altogether surprising that their match made most of the spectators feel that they had aged several years as well. At the start of the day, the All England Club hired some painters to transform the security barriers from concrete grey to a fetching shade of green, and sitting down to watch them dry would have been a tempting alternative to Bjorkman versus Arthurs.

Bjorkman won 6-2, 6-1, 6-4 between the rain, and didn’t even have to work as hard as the largely unemployed staff at the cushion hire stall.

Arthurs is an engaging off-court character, and one of the most popular players in Australia. This is a country in which good blokes are more highly regarded than good players, and Arthurs, who shouts his round in the pub, and stands in the queue for a meat pie, has not been saddled with the same drama queen tag as two of his more successful compatriots, Lleyton Hewitt, and Mark Philippoussis.

The same applies to Bjorkman in his own country, and when raucous bands of Swedish supporters pour over for the Australian Open, he often takes the regular fans out to dinner. This is not a problem in Australia, where even at the fanciest establishment you can peruse the wine list with a pair of Viking horns perched on your head and yellow and green paint daubed all over your face, without the slightest risk of the maitre d’ turning sniffy.

For Arthurs, the real culinary issue on Monday was that he was mentally out to lunch. He still has the big serve that once made him a player to avoid at Wimbledon, but Bjorkman biffed it back so contemptuously that the Australian lost four of his first six service games.