On a day when Eugenie Bouchard halted her nightmarish run of form and the defending champion, Madison Keys, was bundled out in two sharp sets by the Swiss teenager, Belinda Bencic, Britain’s Johanna Konta hogged the limelight. She stunned the world No8, Ekaterina Makarova, with a wonderful display of forceful, cool and confident tennis.
Konta won emphatically, 6-2, 6-4, to set up a third-round match against Garbiñe Muguruza and the margin of victory would have been even greater if she had not suffered a slight but ultimately inconsequential wobble during the second set.
To put Konta’s achievement into context, it was not just the finest triumph of her career, but the biggest win by a British female player on home soil since Sam Smith beat Conchita Martínez, who was the world No7 at the time, in the third round of Wimbledon in 1998.