By the second week the grass is gone where it matters most

The bald patches behind the baselines and around the service line turn a grass court into something closer to hard packed dirt.

Look at Centre Court on the middle Saturday and then look at it on the second Sunday. The green rectangle has two brown scars behind the baselines and a worn strip through the service boxes. Those are not cosmetic. They are a different playing surface, and half the matches of the tournament are contested on them.

Fresh grass is a layer of vegetation over compacted soil, and the vegetation is what makes the ball skid low and fast. Wear it away and you are playing on the soil itself, which is hard, dry and dusty by the second week. The ball grips slightly more, sits up slightly higher, and the bounce becomes less predictable because the surface is no longer uniform. Players talk about the courts playing slower late in the fortnight and the usual explanation is that the grass has worn. It is closer to the truth to say the grass is no longer there.

That has consequences for who is still standing. A player whose game depends on the skid, on a low slice and a flat drive, has been losing their advantage a little each day. A heavy topspin baseliner, who suffered in the first week when the ball would not sit up for them, is progressively coming into conditions closer to what they know. The tournament effectively slows down as it goes, which is a strange property for a championship and one that is barely discussed as a competitive factor.

The unpredictability part matters more than the speed. A bounce off a bare patch can do something a bounce off intact grass will not, and a bad bounce on a break point is a real event rather than an excuse. The groundstaff can do very little about it inside a fortnight because grass does not regrow on that timescale, which is why the whole apparatus of covers, rotation of courts and limited practice access exists.

I would like the wear pattern treated as information rather than as scenery. A camera shot of the court on day nine tells you something specific about how the next match will play.

The scar behind the baseline is a weather report for the second week, and everybody films it without reading it.