THE BRITISH, having lost their heads after a single Test match victory and a couple of decent performances in a friendly football tournament this summer, are now after the hat-trick with tennis, another sport they believe they own the copyright on.

Tim Henman is the man expected to provide a further boost to the nation's previously battered sporting morale.

The heavy burden of expectation is heightened by the fact that Henman has, on the strength of his showing last year and his nationality, been included among the seeds for this year's championships ... the first Briton to achieve such a distinction since Buster Mottram in 1982.

Buster could hardly have enjoyed the honour much as a prominent member of the National Front it must have troubled him greatly that the other 15 favourites for the title were all foreigners.

Henman, on the other hand, is certainly enjoying the attention. His celebrity status was born out of last year's win over Yevgeny Kafelnikov on the way to the last eight at Wimbledon and enhanced by his strong performances around the turn of the year when he reached the semi-finals of the Grand Slam Cup in Germany and gained his first ATP Tour victory at the Sydney International Open. All this has brought endorsement contracts, most notably from Slazenger, and considerably boosted his income.

Since that strong spell in the southern hemisphere, however, things have not gone so sweetly for the 22-year-old from Oxford. An elbow injury has severely restricted his tournament schedule for most of the past six months and he has been sidelined for six weeks while undergoing surgery to remove some bone from the joint.

His form when he has been fit has been erratic, and disappointing performances in Milan, Key Biscayne and the French Open have contributed to his current ranking of 20 - it had soared to 14 at the start of the year.

For others this sort of track record heading into a major tournament would have the understandable effect of dampening the hopes of supporters. But it seems that everybody, from his family to the slightly frenzied British media, have the feeling that, unlike the succession of tennis also-rans produced by Britain over the past couple of decades, Henman genuinely has the potential for greatness.

In the build-up to these All England Championships English commentators have compared their leading player to everyone from Bjorn Borg to Fred Perry and everything from an uncaged wild cat to the Hale-Bop comet. He has, they feel, the range of shots, the power, the speed and the temperament to win. But most of all, they can't help reminding us, he has ... the breeding.

Henman, as it happens, is the grandson of the last woman to serve underarm at Wimbledon and the great-grandson of the first to serve there in the modern style. His grandfather also did well there during the 1940s and, from a very early age, Tim, he says, realised that tennis was simply in his blood.

At six, he claims "I knew that all I wanted to do was become a professional tennis player." But confirmation that he had the ability to pursue his dream was slow to come. He was, physically, a late developer and did not capture a national title of any description until he was 18.

Nevertheless he had the confidence to leave his exclusive public school at 16 with as near to no qualifications as makes no difference and has since explained that "I don't think that anybody has ever successfully combined education and tennis."

In the intervening years his confidence has continued to grow and despite being completely dismantled by Michael Chang at the Australian Open he shows no signs of being overawed by the prospect of coming up against the very biggest names.

"If I play Chang again, or even Sampras," he said recently, "I'm confident that I'll win. I've improved and improved. I have a good chance against anybody."

Recently this sort of bravado has looked to be somewhat misplaced with first or second-round defeats by the likes of Davide Scala, Julian Olonso-Pintor and Olivier Delaitre a little trickier to explain away than the odd hammering by the world number two. With an impeccable sense of timing, however, Henman produced a better showing at Nottingham over the past week to ensure that all eyes in SW19 will be firmly fixed on the local boy.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, word has it that the author and sometime tennis correspondent Martin Amis, who has been writing about Henman in a recent edition of the New Yorker magazine, is going to tip his fellow countryman at this year's championships.

Last year, Amis persuaded the London Evening Standard to let him cover the tournament for them and, in his preview, informed readers that the three men to look out for were Chang, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier. Just like them, he wasn't around for the second day. Henman should last longer than that but whether he is still entertaining the crowds during the tournament's closing stages seems rather more doubtful.