I happened to be in the right place at the right time last Sunday evening, and got invited to go to the middle Saturday of Wimbledon yesterday with Susie. Our colleague Dave has been stewarding there for years and had a couple of ground tickets to give away.
Getting there and back was easy: the regular Southampton to London train goes through Wimbledon station, although it doesn't stop, but for the tennis fortnight they add Wimbledon as a stop so we could get off there and walk to the ground without having to go into London and out again.
Ground tickets allow you to go anywhere in the ground and to find an available seat on any of the 17 or so courts except Centre Court, Court One and Court Two; you have to pay extra for allocated seats in those courts. We soon found out that for the most part, anyone you've heard of will be playing on those three courts :), but we had a wander round to get our bearings then took Dave's advice and sat in the first couple of spare seats we could find and watched whatever happened to be on that court. Turns out it was showing junior matches (hence we could get a seat) but we watched some really great tennis, particularly from Oliver Golding, a British 16-year-old who knocked out his American opponent with ease and went on to get as far as the semi-finals - will be keeping an eye on him for the future.
After we'd been watching that court for a couple of hours - in the middle of the day, and it was really hot, so our legs were sticking to the plastic chairs - we left to go and find some shade for a while, and we found it next to the ice cream stand, so we thought it would be rude not to buy one ;). We sat on the hill in front of the big screen and ate our ice creams, but we left to find another court as soon as we'd finished, for two reasons: firstly, we thought it was silly to watch Nadal on a TV screen when we could have stayed at home and done that; and secondly, the hill was really uncomfortable! It looks like a gentle slope with some flat areas when you see it on TV, but in reality anything that isn't flat slopes at a 40 degree angle. The place was packed and the only place we found to sit was on one of the slopes - we had to put our bags underneath our bums to stop ourselves from sliding down the hill ;). So we went off and stood in a queue to get on the court that was showing Paul-Henri Mathieu play Thiemo de Bakker, the guy who had knocked out John Isner in the previous round, Isner having played that match against Nicolas Mahut before that. The courts that don't have reserved seating work on a first come, first served basis, and that seat is yours until you leave it. We noticed that the match was at the tie-break stage in the second set and at the end of the set, enough people left to enable us to get on the court. We watched a couple of sets of that (it went to 5 sets in the end), but then we left to meet Dave when he went on his break. He got us strawberries and cream and cups of tea in the stewards' private lounge :).
If anyone with a ticket for one of the three main courts leaves before the end of the day, they can choose to give their ticket in and it will be re-sold for £5 and the money given to charity. We went to look at the resales queue just after 17:00 but it was massive: Andy Murray was playing on Centre Court that evening, and we concluded that because of that, not many people were likely to leave early, and even if they did there were hundreds of people already in the queue waiting to get their hands on the tickets. We decided that rather than spend the next two hours standing in line with no guarantee that we'd get tickets to Centre Court, we would take Dave's advice and find him at his post on gate 13 of Number One Court, where he sneaked us in :). There were plenty of spare seats - the resales thing only works up to the point where people who are leaving early can be bothered to hand in their tickets. If they don't, the resales team doesn't know that there are empty seats that could be filled by people waiting. We had to move seats twice because people turned up with valid tickets for the seats we were in, but we had no problem finding other empty seats, and ended up spending a couple of hours on that court as well, watching Sam Querrey beat Xavier Malisse (Querrey was then knocked out by Murray in the next round).
We had an incredible day: the atmosphere was amazing, and we were both astounded at the professionalism of all the ball boys and girls, line judges, umpires etc. We made a quick stop at the gift shop on the way out to buy ridiculously overpriced keyrings as souvenirs of our visit, walked back to the station and were home by 22:00. Must do it again sometime :).
