Sinner survives five-set scare as Wimbledon opens with British setbacks

Jannik Sinner was forced into a five-set opening-day battle on Centre Court before edging Miomir Kecmanović 4-6, 6-3, 6-7(6), 6-2, 6-3 as Wimbledon 2026 began at the All England Club in London. The top seed and defending men’s champion had to recover after dropping the first set and again after losing the third-set tiebreak, but he finished with the sharper response, taking the fourth 6-2 and the fifth 6-3.

The result gave an early measure of the defending champion’s grass-court resilience. Sinner was trying to join the small group of men to win consecutive Wimbledon titles, and his first match suggested that the path will be built less on clean scoreboard dominance than on his ability to absorb pressure and win the longer stretches of a best-of-five contest. On the opening day, that same test of durability ran through much of the British interest as well.

Cameron Norrie, Britain’s No. 1, lost a marathon first-round match to American Michael Zheng, 6-7(7), 6-2, 6-7(2), 6-3, 7-6(4), after more than four hours on court. Harriet Dart also went out on No.1 Court, beaten 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 by Jelena Ostapenko. The numbers told the story of the day for Britain: neither player could turn a share of momentum into a breakthrough set, and both ended up on the wrong side of tight finishing games.

Those defeats landed against a heavier backdrop for the home contingent. Emma Raducanu withdrew on 28 June with a stress fracture in her right leg, and Jack Draper pulled out the same day because of a recurrence of his left arm injury, stripping away two of Britain’s biggest names before the first ball was struck. That left Norrie and Dart carrying more of the opening-day load than planned, with both exiting before nightfall.

The rest of the day-one programme underlined the scale of the opening Monday. Aryna Sabalenka beat Teodora Kostovic, and Novak Djokovic defeated Wu Yibing, placing Sinner’s tense win inside a first day that already featured several of the tournament’s biggest names. For a grass-court event that often reveals its shape early, the first read was clear: Sinner looked vulnerable but composed, Britain was immediately under strain, and the draw had already moved into the hard part of the fortnight.