Henman makes progress in typically English fashion

After the tumult and angst of Greg Rusedski, the rampant good manners of Tim Henman. Even when someone shouted, maybe a little ironically, "Come on, Tiger," he refrained from even the glimmerings of a scowl.

But the boy is incorrigibly English, which of course the tormented Rusedski, despite his notional support of Arsenal, will never quite be. The point was overwhelming at the Centre Court yesterday when Henman, less than than 24 hours after his Davis Cup team-mate's fulmination of F-words, coasted past the modestly committed Frenchman Michael Llodra, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3.

To be absolutely fair to the disgraced - but mildly punished Rusedski - there were not the beginnings of a career or life crisis for the perfectly moulded son of Middle England.

Henman picked up his burden as England's last hope in SW19 a little earlier than usual, but as he said with a shrug, it was merely "business as usual". As he spoke, with just a touch of the put-upon forbearance of a young vicar weighed down by parish duties, there was no question that he could ever fail the test once applied by the cricket Bible Wisden to the transplanted captain of England, Tony Greig. When Greig led the defection to the Australian business magnate Kerry Packer's cricket circus back in the seventies. Wisden said the problem was that the captain simply wasn't English "through and through."

Maybe Henman's problem always has been, and always will be, that he is indeed shot through so thoroughly with his sense of duty: to play well, to behave well, and never for a moment rage at the freakish nature of his sporting destiny.

England yearns for him to win Wimbledon, and he yearns with the nation. Yesterday he talked again about something that happened on three damp days two summers ago. "No question, the most difficult match I've ever played in my career was the Ivanisevic one," he said. "Because I think it was unique. I'd never experienced playing over three days in such an important match. I look back at that match and I reflect on it a lot.

"You know, I ask myself whether I should have done anything differently. And the answer is no. You know, it was difficult. Wasn't much fun sleeping those nights, coming back at different stages of the match. But again you're put in a situation you've got to deal with the best way you can. I felt I did deal with it the best I can. But I came second on the three days."

Here, on one of these Wimbledon days that Henman has experienced so often before entering the eye of the annual storm - a match of gently rising expectations as he inevitably reminds us that if he is not good enough to win Wimbledon he is certainly talented enough to have many entertain the possibility - he was toying with his own sporting epitaph. "I came second on the three days."

Three days of draining tension which Goran Ivanisevic survived and Henman didn't. That, no doubt, is why the meaning of those days is so unshakeable in the Henman psyche. He finished second and Ivanisevic retrieved something which had so long seemed dead in his passionate soul.

But beneath that English veneer, as well manicured as the Oxfordshire lawn of his youth, plainly there is passion too, and none the less of it for its sometimes stagy manifestations.

"I try to take the positives of that [Ivanisevic experience] and try to learn from it and try to build from it. You know, at the time it's pretty difficult to take anything positive out of that scenario. But having said that, I just feel at this stage of the tournament I've played better today, and it certainly gives me something to go away and work with and try to build more and more momentum.

"You know, let's try to get to the semis again and give myself another shot at making the final." There it is again, a commitment made in the face of long and aching disappointment.

Apologists for Rusedski's appalling behaviour on Wednesday, when he crumbled after an idiot line call from the Centre Court terracing threw him in a vital game against Andy Roddick, say that it was the result of nine months of injury pressure and frustration.

Tough, perhaps, but then place it alongside Henman's yearly way of the Wimbledon cross. Of course, he doesn't shed blood. He augments a growing fortune. He isn't pointed at derisively in the street. But then neither can he discharge a bogus debt. Yesterday he was questioned quite pointedly about the meaning of the movie based on the fantasy idea of a modern English player winning Wimbledon, the shooting of which held up his game with Llodra by half an hour.

He pushed aside the questions because they went to the heart of his situation. Had Henman's mission been abandoned in favour of make-believe? "I hope not," Henman said. But maybe that, deep down, would be seen as some relief.

In the meantime he will operate in a world as real as Wimbledon's Centre Court can create, one certainly weird enough to see an umpire's call for the switching off of mobile phones as a matter for enthusiastic applause. This is not a new development; the habit has been around for almost as long as Tim Henman has been trying, with such transparent decency, to fill the emotional void it has come to represent.