Serena’s Wimbledon singles comeback is ON

**Catherine Whitaker** (0:11)
Hello, and welcome to The Tennis Podcast. Coming to you live tonight, somewhat ahead of our original schedule, because events have overtaken proceedings in dramatic fashion this evening, with the news that broke a little over 90 minutes ago that the eighth and final women's singles main draw wild card for Wimbledon, which had been mysteriously held back for a few days there, has now been allocated to seven-time former champion Serena Williams, four years after her retirement at the 2022 US Open, and at the age of 44, Serena Williams will be returning to singles competition at Wimbledon a week from now.
We will be there with live shows just like this one every night of the championships from the broadcast roof overlooking the ground. If you want to join us for those shows, hit the subscribe button on our YouTube channel and get notified when we're going live. All shows, of course, will be available as podcasts as well. David Law, Matt Roberts are both here. Of course, Serena deserves nothing less than a full house.
David, I'm going to ask you how shocked you are by this news. By that, I mean not in the context of today or this week, or maybe even this month, because we were on standby to do a live show following this news, weren't we? As soon as those wildcards got announced and there was one free and Serena was practicing at Wimbledon, we knew there was a strong possibility of this. I think we all kind of knew when Serena confirmed her comeback generally, that she most likely wasn't in this just for the doubles. So when I ask you how shocked you are, I kind of mean how shocked would David Law of 12 months ago have been to have been shown a glimpse into the future and see Wimbledon 2026 with Serena Williams in it.

**David Law** (2:17)
Yeah, I'd have been pretty shocked, I think. I think the only thought I'd had was when the US Open mixed doubles got announced. I thought she was going to play that. Even last year, I thought she was going to play that because, you know, why not? Nothing really to lose, you know, just get yourself more or less ready for that. But if somebody had told me that she would be playing singles at Wimbledon, I think the only thing that would have given me pause for thought is the fact that Venus was doing that, you know, for a few years and she's older than Serena. So with that in mind, well, why not? You know, but I just hadn't really heard an inkling about this at all. We know, until she rejoined the testing pool for the anti-doping. That was the moment that suddenly actually not just doubles, mixed doubles, but actually playing tennis again seemed absolutely on the cards. But even as much as the last show that we did, and that's just a few days ago, 10 minutes before we came on air, I was thinking, no, I think she's going to not play Wimbledon, but she's going to come back following it. She's going to start with doubles.
And then when I joined the show, I suddenly thought, no, I think I'm changing my mind. I think she is going to play. And then when Matt said he'd seen the video footage of her at Orangley Park practicing at Wimbledon when there's still a week and a half to go and nothing to do, and even the doubles doesn't even start until half way through the first week, I thought, well, yeah, she's going to play singles, isn't she? But even so, when the news dropped today, it still was like, wow.
This is pretty mega, isn't it?

**Catherine Whitaker** (4:02)
Yeah. I mean, Matt, you've been in this tennis media game a while now. Like, where does this rank for you in terms of size of story? If 10 is Djokovic deportation, let's say one is the Alcaraz buzzcut.
Fun, but I know David thinks it's very consequential, but fun, but not emergency podcast worthy. Where does this rank?

**Matt Roberts** (4:35)
I think we're closer to deportation than buzzcut territory. I wasn't expecting those to be my first words on this show tonight.
Yeah, look, a year ago, I was not thinking about this at all, honestly. Not even a tiny bit was I thinking that Serena Williams would come back to play tennis. It wasn't on my radar at all. I think in terms of big news, I think that Djokovic's news had such worldwide news political cut-through that I'm not sure this gets there. But just in terms of for a tennis story, it's absolutely enormous. I mean, the standard I always go to is waking up and finding out that Ash Barty had retired. But that's the one that I still remember the most as being like the most shocking, the most like what is going on kind of thing. But this is right there with that, I would say.