“You practise, you wait for the tournament to start and it’s good to have played already and get it over with. I served seven aces so I’m in pretty good shape.”So is Steffi Graf. Considering she won the French Open when she was using it to warm up for Wimbledon, you could say she will not lack motivation at the All England Club this fortnight. She desperately wants a seventh title and, if the evidence of yesterday is anything to go by, she will take some stopping.Ludmila Cervanova was her opponent but in reality she was just a minor irritation in Graf’s regal path, being swept aside 6-1, 6-4. If the German had kept her concentration the match would have been even quicker than the 42 minutes it required.”I have never seen her before, I knew nothing about her and I didn’t know what to expect,” Graf said, “but it didn’t take too long. Here and there I didn’t finish off points quickly enough but I felt OK.”After trading the first two games Graf rattled off the next five, dropping only eight points along the way.

Cervanova rallied briefly to get to 3- 3 in the second but, once she was broken in the seventh game, it was just a matter of time.Tauziat, the eighth seed, defeated Britain’s Lucie Ahl 6-3, 6-2 in 55 minutes while her fellow French seed, Sandrine Testud, also had a relatively easy match against a home player, beating Julie Pullin 6-1, 6-3 in two minutes over the hour.Amanda Coetzer, seeded 12, lost the longest match this year on the WTA Tour last Friday when her Eastbourne semi-final with Natasha Zvereva stretched to 3 hours 28 minutes so yesterday’s 77-minute match with Nicole Pratt will have been welcome So will the 6-2, 7-5 result.. ARVIND PARMAR, the British No 10 who had gone out of his last six tournaments in the first round, pulled off the surprise of Wimbledon’s first day when he defeated the world No 25, Spain’s Alberto Costa. Parma, the 21-year-old world No 455 from Hitchin, won 0-6, 7-6, 6-3, 6-3, despite losing the first nine games to a player who has been a quarter-finalist at Wimbledon and in the Australian and French Opens and was listed among the world’s top 10 players only two years ago. It is comfortably the best result of his career.
Parma said he felt he was a better player than his ranking suggested. “I felt confident coming into the tournament on the back of the qualifiers,” he said “I played very well today I was a little bit nervous at the start. It’s the first time I’ve been on the courts as a singles player and I was panicking.

At 6-0, 3-0 down I told myself `get back to basics’ and I managed to break back.” His next opponent will be none other than Britain’s No 2, Greg Rusedski.Parmar, who turned professional in 1996, has been slightly higher in the world rankings, but only just, reaching the dizzy heights of No 394 in October last year, while his doubles standing is also slightly more respectable – No 416, also down slightly from last August’s 370.Even further down the singles standing is Danny Sapsford, the world No 595 who is biding his time until retirement. Even at his peak three years ago, Sapsford only reached 178th in the world, so it is fair to say the British No 12 never had Pete Sampras and company quaking, but he might if he continues in the same vein as yesterday in beating Spain’s Julian Alonso 6-2, 6-2, 7-5.Not that Sapsford is bothered too much either way. “Today was the first day I could get out on the court and run around, I’ve been struggling with my knees and back,” he said. How had he prepared for the tournament? “Taking it easy, resting and doing the gardening.”That is a little ingenuous because the 30-year-old Sapsford had the little matter of seven qualifying matches just to play at the tournament but, if the state of him after he had a five-setter at Roehampton is anything to go by, he is probably the unfittest player at Wimbledon.