Need no tickets

Summer time and summer vacations both bring a great way to break the monotony of things – Wimbledon! The third Grand Slam of the year, and undeniably the most prestigious award for any tennis player. Wimbledon is held in the last week of June and goes up to the first weekend of July. This year, the tournament will be held from June 23, to of July 6, and even with the acutely-felt absence of Justine Henin it is promising to be a very interesting event to watch out for.

If you happen to be an avid tennis fan, it is quite likely that you would want to keep up to date on everything related to the tournament. And it just is not enough to simply watch the matches, especially with the plethora of websites around in cyberspace to give you an insight to all that is happening to the players, the interesting tidbits of news and views, the opinion and prediction of the experts, and of course, the interview transcripts of the players which are always interesting to read.

The official Wimbledon website where you can visit regularly is http://www.wimbledon.org.Although the selection of news and photographs is limited here, but the section on live scores is the best. However, the section on matches is in progress and will let you know (on a point-by-point basis) how the match is progressing. If you have good internet connection, the page will refresh itself as soon as the player wins a point. Of course, this cannot beat the actual watching of the match on your television, but if TV is not an option, then you can avail the opportunity.

The website also offers you to relive some of the best moments in the past championships, for example, there is a whole collection of videos featuring some of the best played points over the years. There are videos on the Wimbledon legends, highlights of the 2006 championship and loads of more stuff to watch and enjoy, assuming of course, that your internet connection supports streaming content.

For the news and photo galleries, I found the Yahoo! Sports section on tennis http://sports.yahoo.com/ten/ the best. This website not only has media on the Wimbledon Championships, but the French Open as well. You can find loads of photos and news stories from different wires. The best part of course, is the seed report and the mid-term grades by Sports Illustrated staff writer Jon Wertheim. These reports are usually posted in the tennis section of Yahoo! Sports. But you can always log onto Sports Illustrated at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/index.html to get the latest and read the reports directly.

The tennis section of Sports Illustrated is also a treat for avid tennis fans, as it features things like top tennis performances of the year, top earning players in tennis singles and win-loss records of different players.

However, there is also a very large selection of articles written by the tennis writers – most of them are opinion pieces and you will find that there is a whole debate going on as to why Justine Henin suddenly retired from tennis while she was the top-ranked player.

Moving on to players, when it comes to Wimbledon, Roger Federer is the person who has been dominating the men’s finals for the past few years. This year, it would be an understatement to say that he is still the favourite to win the title. To know more about Roger Federer and his performance on the ATP tour, you can log onto his official website http://www.rogerfederer.com

On the women’s side, the Williams sisters are always the favourite, considering that they have dominated more times than anyone else in the past few years. However, they are sure to get a very stiff competition from some of the upcoming players like Anna Ivanovic as well as the more experienced ones like Maria Sharapova. To get an insight into the Williams sisters, you can visit their fan website at http://www.williamssisters.org/ as well as their official websites at http://www.serenawilliams.com/ and http://www.venuswilliams.com/. The latter website of course has a lot on Venus’s other activities too.

So there you have it – Wimbledon is no more about sitting in front of your television and watching a match. It is about watching one match, going online to read the reports, post-match interviews of both the players, predicting the outcome, finding out the winning player etc. And of course, if you are a diehard fan of any player, you might want to interact with fans around the world and share views about the different matches of that player.