The heavy artillery rolled out at Wimbledon on Sunday as world No 1 Jannik Sinner successfully defended his men’s singles title amid a fusillade of aces…

After the deftness and artistry of Saturday’s women’s final, Sinner’s collision with Alexander Zverev was a contrasting study in power. The transition felt jarring, like going from one of Disney’s classic hand-drawn animations to a Transformers movie about two CGI robots bashing chunks out of each other.

It was a competitive match, and a highly impressive one in a technical sense, but the texture of the play was so serve-dominated that we could almost have travelled back 30 years to the era of Pete Sampras and Goran Ivanisevic.

Astonishingly, it took two hours and 54 minutes of play for the first break of serve to come up. This arrived in the 34th game of the match, with the score standing at 6-7, 7-6, 4-3 – which soon became 5-3 in the third set when Zverev pushed a forehand long and then threw his racket sideways along the baseline in frustration.