Tennis: Wimbledon '93 / Wood unable to escape the Graf punchline: Paul Hayward witnesses the British challenger and the Wimbledon champion fighting fear on the Centre Court

BRITAIN'S No 4 against the world No 1. There was much to divide Clare Wood and Steffi Graf on the Centre Court, but one thing to unite them. The need to smother fear before the first ball was hit.

In Graf's case it was the fear of cranks and obsessives pressing against the window of her life. For Wood, it was more a matter of refusing to submit in advance to Graf's ball-crashing power and heaped Grand Slam titles. 'I didn't go on court thinking I couldn't win the match,' Wood said after she had lost 6-2, 6-1. 'I stood a chance.'

The risk that Wood ran was to suffer death by sneer, by journalistic cliche. Nothing presents such easy meat as a British tennis player thrown into the gale of a champion's advance, and everything in Wood's biography set her up for the kind of pseudo-humorous savaging that is visited upon the normally hapless home team during Wimbledon fortnight.

For one, she is ranked 109 in the world and lists her best performance as reaching the third round of the Australian Open in 1991. She is also a clergyman's daughter ('So no blaspheming on court,' she said self- mockingly). Shooting balloons in a funfair would have been harder than knocking out Clare Wood jokes yesterday as she faced the scatter-gun attack of Graf's groundstrokes.

A look of resignation, of powerlessness, can overtake opponents when Graf races in to bury a loose shot or slams a return into the furthest extremity of the court. It happened to Kirrily Sharpe, Graf's first victim at the tournament. 'I've seen her before on television, but you have to play her to know how good she is,' Sharpe said. 'You have to be there to witness it. And I witnessed it.'

Wood did, too, but never accepted the role assigned to her. 'I struggled, especially in her first few service games, to get a racket to the ball because they were coming down so hard,' she said. 'But I was always hyped up and determined to hang with her as much as possible.' Only once did she lapse: in the first game of the second set, when Graf sent such a geometry-defying shot back that Wood stopped to applause. Never be nice to a bully.

History, to a point, was on her side. The first British woman to beat Graf was Shelly Walpole of Surrey (Solihull, May 1983), and she, too, had a religious connection, having married a theological student from Canada. Jo Durie has also beaten her four times, on the last occasion, in 1985, in Wood's home town of Brighton, one of Graf's favourite venues for the anonymity it affords.

Not much help at 1-5 and a set down, admittedly. By then the gulf in class had opened up, and Graf was free to think about her impending trip down the King's Road, her dinner out in London and the concert she plans to attend this weekend. The meeting of Miss C J Wood and Miss S Graf - the modern useage, 'Ms', has not made it through the gates of Wimbledon yet - was about to end as it had started: with a double fault from Britain.

And to think that Graf barely knows who some of her victims are. 'If I see her at tournaments she always says 'Hello', so I think she has a pretty good idea who I am,' Wood said of Graf after the match. Despite that, not a word was exchanged between the two players either before or after the game.

Wood was asked more about Graf than her own game. Graf was asked more about stalkers than tennis. Matters of fame and madness are in danger of dominating the women's game these days, and Graf's repeated attempts to sidestep issues of intimidation and peril are proving fruitless in this climate.

In the morning, two bodyguards accompanied her to the practice courts. 'That's something the officials did because they thought it was necessary,' she said in reference to the expulsion on Tuesday of a German spectator who had verbally abused her. 'It was nothing. I don't want to talk about this incident because I don't take it very seriously.'

If that is true, Graf is alone in dismissing the sequence of unsavoury intrusions that have bedevilled women's tennis in recent years. 'I think you are making it sort of big in the papers,' she said. 'I don't think you are making it easy for the players. I really have to say that.' Her leaden demeanour, though, and the way she talks about the relief of actually playing the game in the safe zone of those white lines, suggest fear is a more constant companion than she would admit.

'Whenever I step out there, there is nothing on my mind,' she said in one of those inadvertent disclosures that players make under the unremitting questioning here. 'I look forward to getting on court because that's when I don't think about anything else.'

(Photograph omitted)