Liam Brody advances to second round of Wimbledon after beating Marco Cecchinato in straight sets

While Andy Murray was scrapping for survival over on the big stage, Liam Broady led the advance for British men into the second round on Court Three.

It has been a slog of a career for the 27-year-old wild card, whose four previous Grand Slam appearances had featured just a single victory prior to his impressive straight sets win over the world No 86 Marco Cecchinato.

In crushing the former French Open semi-finalist 6-3, 6-4, 6-0 Broady reached the second round here for the first time since 2015, then pointed to a conversation with Murray in 2020 as a potentially decisive moment in his life. It came a couple of years after Broady considered quitting the game in frustration, and the subsequent improvement has carried him up to 143 in the rankings.

‘I had an incredible conversation over dinner with Andy after the Battle of the Brits tournament and it kind of turned things around for me,’ he said. ‘I think the whole pandemic has made people mature, or certainly people who were immature before. It has made me mature a lot in the right ways.

‘Someone tweeted me a stat that said I’d had 700 career matches and a lot of those were bad tennis. This year my ranking has moved in the right direction. My tennis has been watchable for the first time in my pro career. 

‘I messed around more than other people similar ages and my peers, but if I hadn’t done that would I be in the same position now? I am grateful to be in this position because I almost stopped tennis a few times. The end of 2018 I was close to hanging the rackets up.’

British No 6 Jay Clarke was a set down against Belarus’s Egor Gerasimov when play was suspended for bad light. He lost the opener 6-3 against the world no 73 before taking the second 6-3 and losing the next on a tiebreak.