You bump into French players around every corner at the All England Club. This year the 128-strong fields for the singles competitions started out with 15 Frenchmen and 13 women. Britain had four men (two of whom were given wild cards) and five women (including four wild cards). You have only to visit one of the myriad municipal tennis centres around Paris to appreciate why the French produce so many good players. The courts, most of them in tip-top condition, are full of players, young and old, enjoying this most simple of sports. Provided you have a court, all you need to play, after all, is a racket, some balls and an opponent.

Many people who play tennis in Paris are subscribers to www.tennis.paris.fr, a brilliant website that enables you to book courts throughout the city. It costs nothing to join and invites you to say in what district of the capital and when you want to play. You will then be presented with a (usually) long list of available courts, along with the cost of hiring them, which is no more than a few euros per hour.

It helps, of course, that most courts in the capital come under the jurisdiction of the Parisian mairie (rather than, for example, all the different local authorities responsible for sports facilities in the different districts of London), which is committed to providing affordable sporting facilities for the city’s inhabitants, not to mention the visitors who also take advantage of what is on offer. Nor is Paris alone in providing such excellent facilities. Drive through almost any area of France and you will find a municipal tennis court in even the smallest of villages.

Contrast this with Britain, where municipal sports facilities in so many areas have become run-down over the years. Some of us can remember the days when you could play on beautifully manicured grass courts maintained by your local authority. There are still plenty of council-run courts (although grass courts have become rare), but more and more players are joining privately-run sports centres which demand both substantial joining fees and regular subscriptions.

In such circumstances it is no surprise that tennis in Britain is dominated by the middle classes, while in France its easy availability has made it a largely classless sport. One of the consequences is that nearly every youngster with all-round sporting talent in France
gets the chance to play tennis. A problem for British tennis is that a significant proportion of the country’s best young sportsmen and women rarely get the chance to pick up a racket. In that case, how will anyone ever know whether they might be potential champions?

Both France and Britain have well-funded nationally-run coaching schemes. When players show real promise in either country there is no major reason why they should not make the most of their talent. Some cynics believe that affluent societies can no longer produce a conveyor-belt supply of world-class players because individuals do not have the hunger of their counterparts in poorer countries, but France’s success runs counter to that theory.

And if Britain could ever get as many youngsters playing tennis as in France, how many more Tim Henmans and Andy Murrays might the country produce? The Lawn Tennis Association is an easy target for those who complain about the shortage of top-class British players, but in the end it can only work with what is available. And until the opportunities to play the game become as plentiful as they are across the Channel, the pool of potential talent will never grow.