Federer takes centre stage in bid to crash the party

Tennis/ Wimbledon Championships: The feeling in London about Wimbledon is that this year's championship is a string quartet playing in the antechamber while a wild football street party is going on outside.

No doubt when the reigning champion Roger Federer steps on court today to face the French 20-year-old Richard Gasquet, the volume of the quartet may just rise. If Federer can't do it few can, and even with local interest Tim Henman scheduled to play Sweden's Robin Soderling on Court One today, the critical eye will fall on the champion of the last three years.

The question people will ask is if we should just give the Swiss number one the trophy now.

Smart money says the tournament is for Federer to lose. This is not the clay of Paris but the surface he likes, the surface on which he has won 41 consecutive times. Having already equalled Bjorn Borg's old record, Federer would put himself in a place he is used to, out on his own, with a win over the rather tricky and talented Gasquet.

Tradition says first matches are never straightforward and often difficult. It is impossible for Federer not to look ahead but in quieter moments he will also consider that another championship win will put him on the same list as Borg and Pete Sampras as the only players in the modern era who have won Wimbledon four times.

Let's not race ahead. David Nalbandian, the fourth seed, has also been given the privilege of beginning his campaign on Centre Court, against the unseeded South African Wesley Moody.

Nalbandian has been around for a while and much of his success has come on clay, but no less than an emphatic win over Moody is expected if he is to reach his probable goal of a meeting with Federer in the middle of next week.

Of purely domestic interest, Kristian Pless faces American eighth seed James Blake on the last match in court one. Blake has had accelerated improvement over the last year and would be expected to be around at the beginning of next week.

If that happens the Shelbourne Irish Open €50,000 Challenger event, scheduled for Fitzwilliam next week, will probably have Pless playing. His name is down but his Irish participation obviously hinges on his Wimbledon progress.

Sharing the Centre Court limelight in the women's singles is the French Open champion Justine Henin-Hardenne.

The 24-year-old Belgian, who recently defeated Russia's Anastasia Myskina in the final of the Eastbourne tournament, comes in seeded three and meets the unsung Chinese player Meng Yuan.

The 2001 finalist and twice semi-finalist should not be fretting half as much as her compatriot Kim Clijsters, who meets Vera Zvonareva, who is unseeded but got to a Roland Garros quarter-final in 2003 and twice to the fourth round here.

Two to watch, naturally, but day-one interest in the women's draw will inevitably fall on Martina Hingis and her ongoing project of trying to play her way back and reoccupy the place she once held at the top of the game.

The Swiss hope, seeded 12, takes on the Ukrainian Olga Savchuk out on court two.

It's not the place where the former world number one is used to performing, but Hingis has not played in the Wimbledon singles since she lost in the first round in 2001, having won the event in 1997.