Henman's endeavour reaches its upper limit

There have been times during the protracted agony of Tim Henman's pursuit of the Wimbledon crown when it was reasonable to suspect that John Cleese was lurking in the shadows waiting to declare the sketch over because it was just "too silly".

Yesterday the Monty Python scenario came swirling back as Lleyton Hewitt, the young Australian who is as brash in his ambition to preserve his status as world No 1 as Henman is genteel as he cooks slowly again on the spit of impractical hope, carved new holes in the dream dumped by the English middle class on one of its model sons.

Hewitt was scarcely the height of the racket he wielded so murderously between the showers yesterday when Henman was first handed down a destiny which has been embraced by so many onlookers so hysterically for so long.

But it is an idea that can stand only so many disappointments and as Hewitt brought a hush to the Centre Court – and the numb occupants of Henman Hill – you finally had a sense of the end of something. Something that, you did not really need to be such a tennis expert to know deep down in your bones, was never likely to happen.

Not because Henman is not a fine tennis player – a truth which will always be enshrined in the fact that he was good enough and resolute enough to four times fight his way into the semi-finals of the game's greatest tournament. But because Henman was never good enough, young enough in the way of the great champions. He was still forming his game when the likes of Pete Sampras and Boris Becker, John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg – the list grows too long – and now Hewitt, were raising their fists to the world and their elders. They were raising those fists in various ways, of course, but all of them carried a quality which the gestures of Tim Henman have so poignantly lacked. It was the force of belief which welled up from the deepest roots of their natures.

Henman, by comparison, has always seemed to be playing a role. Gallantly, of course. With great dignity and feeling and, it has to be said, a sense of duty that would do credit to a noviciate monk.

And if so many times the pressure has been great, has sucked him relentlessly into a maelstrom of unsupportable expectation, there have good reasons why the dream has not been cuffed by crushing semi-final defeats inflicted by the great talent of Sampras and the extraordinary spirit of Goran Ivanisevic. It is because Henman has, above all, that extraordinary obligation to give more of himself than is perhaps reasonable for a substantial section of a nation to ask of any mere sportsman. What it means is that just when you are ready to call in Cleese, just when you are about to hand Tim his martyr's crown, he digs down into his English soul and finds another scrap of resistance, another piece of evidence that if the dream is irrational it might just happen, anyway.

So it was at various points of a match yesterday which so often teetered on the brink of slaughter. Certainly there were times when Henman raised himself spectacularly above the level that so often has left him struggling on the edge of destruction in this tournament.

In the first set he was betrayed too often by an errant backhand but he had moments of smooth, finely delivered aggression. On several occasions he got to the net with genuine conviction, and some of his ground shots began to match the authority of Hewitt's, but the weight and the efficiency of the Australian's game was mostly just too remorseless.

But then, when the slaughter seemed to be in train, when Hewitt rampaged through the rain-interrupted second second set 6-1, we had other glimpses of the authentic Henman. This is not to say an authentic champion because that, yesterday insisted, is almost certainly beyond his powers now, but rather a genuine performer operating at the limits of his ability.

The final score of 7-5, 6-1, 7-5 was expressive enough of the gap between the players, but in the dog minutes of the last set Henman made a last forlorn gesture, one which brought ripples of applause from the distraught bank of supporters in front of the big screen on the hill. With a supreme effort he broke back, and the desperate cries of "Come on Tim" took on a last surge of manic energy.

Of course they were fruitless. Henman once again had burned through all available fuel. He had pumped the air with his fist from time to time, he had raged at himself in his polite Oxfordshire middle-class way, and he made one last assault on the confidence of the kid from Adelaide who comes from a long line of Aussie "footie" players, men for whom the niceties of public expectation are swamped by much more basic imperatives. Such as beating the hell out of the man who stands in your path.

Hewitt of course had his shaky moments earlier in the week, and yesterday some of his less appealing antecedents were being recalled in anticipation of the emergence of a new Superbrat, a champion in the rough tradition of McEnroe, a storming wager of psychological war who recently was forced into a public apology for on-court remarks which were deemed "racist".

But it will not be so easy to demonise the wild boy from Adelaide because he brings what McEnroe brought, an intensity of purpose which fills a tennis court and beats down all opposition. Yesterday the yearnings that welled up behind the cause of Tim Henman were smashed as if they were matchwood.

Henman's landing should be soft. A grateful nation should realise that he did as much as he could – and it was considerable. He did not ask to be a one-man crusade on behalf of national well-being. He just wanted to be a tennis player. The record shows that he has been a very good one – and an extremely decent young man.

However, the way things are, England may still struggle to forgive him. They made him the vehicle of a far-fetched dream. Unfortunately, Henman has to inhabit that dream entirely on his own. The nation had the dream and yesterday he inherited the nightmare.