“But I also have an itch to scratch about social issues. We get fantastically frustrated with tennis sometimes and the manner in which it intersects with social issues, and could be doing more, and is complacent about the platform that it has … but I’m very grateful for that intersection.”

Law, who has worked in tennis media since the 1990s, is the podcast father figure at 50; Whitaker, 37, wrote to Law asking if she could work with him in some tennis-related capacity while still at college in 2007; Roberts, 27, tweeted Law asking much the same thing in 2015. The generational span serves them well on air, and in life.

Law knew he had something special with both from the start.

“I thought, ‘She’s got something’,” he says of the young Whitaker, and he was right. Like Law, who commentates for the BBC, she now has an on-camera role with Amazon Prime and Eurosport all thanks to the podcast.

When Roberts came along, his tennis brain and charm led to Law and Whitaker adding him to the on-air team in 2018.

“It was a missing piece of the jigsaw,” Law says. “Something we didn’t know we needed.”

It’s a career path that Roberts did not foresee when he discovered the podcast as a teenager.

“I used to listen on the bus to school,” he recalls. “I can’t say I listened to the first one, but I reckon it was probably episode 10 or something.”

Now the trio travel the world. Sponsors and subscription revenue – Friends of the Pod pay for extra content – fund coverage of the grand slams and other tournaments.

Loading

In Melbourne, they have set up shop on a Richmond terrace, where the couch hosts late-night and early-morning recordings. The results are lapped up by tens of thousands globally daily.

“One of the things we bonded over was a love of podcasts,” says Law, harking back to when the medium was so infant it could barely be called a medium. “So niche,” as Whitaker puts it. Law recalls: “You used to have to download it onto your computer and sync it across to your iPod if you wanted to listen to it.”

Twelve years on, they are tennis fans with tennis fans of their own. Listeners approach Whitaker at Melbourne Park to show her photos of their dogs (her pooch, Billie Jean, is the show’s mascot). Roberts finds fans waiting courtside when he turns up to watch one of his favourite players.

It’s great fun, but still a serious business. Weightier matters always demand attention — such as this tournament’s intersection with controversy over domestic violence allegations against German star Alexander Zverev. In typically blunt fashion, Whitaker called the reaction of other players to Zverev-related questions “pathetic” and “feeble”.

Regular listeners were not surprised because that has become The Tennis Podcast brand: calling faults and winners as and where they see them.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.