So Dyer is that rare and perspicacious thing, a fan who never conflates the quality of the genius with the integrity of the person. The last years of anyone’s life, let alone that of great artists and sportspeople, tend to confirm the wisdom of this view, as illusions unravel, strengths and capacities fail, and regrets circle like unpaid traffic fines.

Having now entered what he describes as the Sunday morning phase of the weekend that is his life, and having also suffered a recent minor stroke, Dyer’s longstanding predisposition towards the elegiac has blossomed into a connoisseurship of lateness and late style, most interestingly, perhaps, when he describes those instances when this kind of disassembling can produce the most aesthetically unified and heartrending works of art.

Among the examples he writes about here is James Salter’s novel, All That Is, which the author wrote when he was 87. Dyer loves All That Is for the ineluctable honesty of its form, for its “signs of dimming or faltering of narrative control, which are also evidence of unwavering faith in the strengths of this diminished capacity”.

Dyer too shows such unwavering faith in his own diminishing tennis game, which he eulogises and lampoons throughout these pages, stricken as he is by the injuries and humiliations of an ageing body. He has chronic neck pain, shoulder pain, can no longer serve, and wears knee supports to get himself around the court. He is mad for tennis, though, precisely for the way it puts everything existentially turgid in parentheses – including his otherwise sedentary life as an ageing writer.

In this sense tennis is the opposite of Nietzsche, the opposite of Beethoven, and Dyer’s own amateur status allows him to rejoice in a Larkinesque view of his own absurdity. But Roger Federer? No way. While the foibles of stars such as Borg, Becker and McEnroe are gleefully enumerated here, and the outsize egoisms of rock stardom rightfully ridiculed, Federer sails above.

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Even as Roger’s career draws to a close, Dyer retains the distance of a true acolyte. He doesn’t go there, he refuses to inspect the entrails. He stays out of the locker room, the hotel, the excesses and the love life. He stays on court. Some things are sacred, after all.

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