Tim's missing ingredient - a Broad-based sense of belief

They will have their game of golf this week after all. "I was kind of hoping that Tim would be too busy dealing with a big win," said Henman's erstwhile doubles partner Neil Broad late on Friday afternoon.

Sitting on the rain-soaked sun-deck of the players' restaurant Broad could see the news unfolding on the scoreboard across the way: 4-1 to Lleyton Hewitt in the second set had just become 5-1. "I really thought Tim could do it this year," Broad confessed, with a shake of the head. "But Hewitt seems to have got the mental edge on him now."

An hour later, Henman's final hopes had been utterly extinguished, and the grisly sequence of semi-final defeats had been extended to four. It could hardly be said that Henman goes out to the lesser lights with three of those defeats being to the ultimate winners of the men's singles, Pete Sampras twice, and Goran Ivanisevic last year. And you won't find many people backing against Hewitt this afternoon.

So is Henman just unlucky, or is there a "glass ceiling" here at the home of his grass-court game? Broad, a winner on Friday afternoon in the Over-35s men's doubles, was not prepared to write off the ultimate aim of the man with whom he shared a memorable fortnight at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. "He'll win it one day, I'm sure," Broad, now coaching teenagers in South Africa, asserted.

Thrown together as the Great Britain doubles pair, Henman and Broad beat all bar the Woodies (Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde), to take the silver medal. They became good friends, on and off court, although Broad admits that "Tim happens to be the type to keep his emotions in check, that's just the way he is." Nevertheless, the pair's success at the Olympics formed a lasting bond.

"We just hit it off together and really gelled." The pair beat a Slovakian duo to whom they had previously lost in the Davis Cup and later found themselves drawn against the experienced Canadians Grant Connell and Daniel Nestor. "I'd had a pretty good record against Connell," Broad recalls (his overall record is seven wins in 17 doubles finals), "and I was pretty confident we could do it.

"So I was a bit surprised when Tim said to me beforehand 'I don't think we can win this one'. Well, we got into the game, and started to play well, and then Tim turned to me to say 'you were right, Broady, we can win this'."

The notion that Henman had once been prone to what might be called defeatism struck home a few hours later at his post-Hewitt press conference. Here was an occasion that could more suitably have taken place in a morgue, such was the mournful tone of the British No 1, so pale was his face. Henman admitted after his defeat to Hewitt at Queen's in the Stella Artois that the Australian's supremacy was established, and he repeated it here, concluding that "the bottom line is he's the better player and it's my job to go away and keep improving my game".

Henman had conceded on the tactical front too, playing to the Aussie's rules by trying to trade baseline shots, fearing that his natural serve and volley game would be "a negative, because you're playing into Hewitt's biggest strengths, his return of serve, and his passing shots... you almost want to border on being a little negative in the rallies, keep the ball in play... and when you get the opportunity, try to end the point."

Whether these tactics had been suggested by his coach Larry Stefanki, or constructed on the run, Henman did not say, but he conceded glumly that "as the scoreline suggests not a lot worked, did it?"

Over the next year, Henman will build on the notion that he still has a chance of taking the title at Wimbledon. Yet you sensed even in his matches before Hewitt, against the qualifiers and unseeded players he beat on the way, that there's a Henman Hill brooding on his own interior landscape. His round of golf with his old friend Neil Broad this week could be one of the most interesting in British tennis.