IT WAS cabaret time at the All England club yesterday but somebody had forgotten to book a headlining act.

Perhaps the organisers were thrown by the weather forecast which had the Met Office predicting a clear dry day with only an outside chance of the odd shower. Whatever it was, there was no Cliff Richard, no Tom Jones, not even a Bruce Forsyth to get a frustrated crowd through a damp and depressing afternoon. Tournament officials here at the All England Club quickly had to chuck their match schedule out of the nearest available window.

This year's championships were barely an hour old when the weather intervened for the first time and by mid afternoon the backlog was already beginning to mount.

With the skies continuing to darken those of a nervous disposition amongst the media were already pondering worst case scenarios and options were being taken out by the press corps on hotel rooms. Mine, it turns out, is available for months so if the rain continues today could somebody please urge my family to keep their chins up and start a "Bring 'im back by Christmas" campaign at the first opportunity.

One or two players will be reunited with their loved ones in the more immediate future, however, with Marcello Craca and Daniel Nestor making enough guest appearances between the downpours yesterday to lose their firstround matches in straight sets to Richard Krajicek and Tim Hen man respectively.

Craca, a 22 year old ranked at 134 in the world, is not without the odd decent victory to his name. Most recently he played well to beat Yevgeny Kafelnikov on clay in Prague but grass is, as they say, a different ball game and the defending champion did not seem overly intimidated.

"It is his first Grand Slam, he has been preparing on clay, he has never played on grass and he is a baseline player," Krajicek told one interviewer last week before adding that "if you hear all these things it should be easy."

Not that the Dutchman was throwing caution entirely to the wind.

"He is," said the fourth seed in a rather half hearted attempt to cover himself against humiliation "an opponent and he will want to beat me."

Perhaps this most generous portion of faint praise helped to fire the underdog up for, through the early stages of this battle, he managed to hold his own for stretches and deservedly forced the opening set into a tie break.

For all the German's endeavour, though, the champion's service was never even briefly under threat while Craca was finding his increasingly difficult to defend. The tie break was keenly contested but once Krajicek had clinched a oneset advantage by taking it by seven points to five Craca's resistance quickly began to crumble.

Krajicek took the second set to two and, with his rocket like first serve, which approached 140 miles per hour on occasion, there looked to be no stopping him.

In the third Craca finally began to venture towards the net when the opportunity arose but, by that point, it was too late to halt the slide. His tactical switch did help him to delay his exit from the tournament but, after a total of 98 minutes on court, the Dutch number one added the third set to complete a victory which, even he conceded afterwards, would not have won any beauty contests.

It may not have been pretty but overall it was a solid performance by the man who everybody will be hoping to deprive of his title. Speaking afterwards the champion certainly seemed pleased with his day's work. Asked whether punters should be tempted by the 7-1 odds offered against him repeating last year's success, he joked "well, economically speaking, they may have been better to back me last year but I feel good now too and I mightn't be a bad bet this year either".

Henman, meanwhile, playing the first championship match on the new Number One court, won a remarkably similar tussle against Nestor, a 24 year old left hander from Ontario. Here too there was a first set tie break but this one lasted 24 points, during which both players had opportunities to clinch it, before the Briton edged his way into the lead with a string of high pressure serves.

"The first set was the important one," admitted the 22 year old from Oxford. "Those times when I was behind on the tie break I paid a little more attention to my first serves and it paid off because there were a couple of big ones there that got me out of trouble."

The similarities with Krajicek's victory continued through the remaining two sets with Henman delighting his many supporters by dropping just one game in the second set and doing enough in the third, in the form of a break to love in game three, to secure his place in the next round.

Despite the havoc which the weather played with the order of play, Henman, seeded 14, is virtually certain of the identity of his second round opponent with Jerome Golmard of France, a devoted clay court specialist who prior to yesterday may well have believed that the expression "playing on grass" was a reference to rock musicians and soft drugs, leading overnight by two sets to one and five game to two in his match against another Englishman, Jamie Delgado.

When the pair return this morning the Frenchman will serve for the match and a chance to upset a more prominent local.