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Wimbledon held its breath as Heather Watson stood up to Serena Williams | Andy Bull

It can be a hard thing to meet your heroes, and a harder thing still to beat them. This was Heather Watson’s first match against Serena Williams, a player she used to idolise as a child. The first time Watson ever came to Wimbledon, when she was “seven or eight” years old, she bought a poster of the Williams sisters, which she then pinned up on her wall. And here she was, more than a decade later, facing the younger of the two on Centre Court. You wondered, when Watson walked out, whether she really believed, deep down, that she could win.