Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player is the guidebook that navigates dreams and disappointments, failures and triumphs—a satirical mid-life-crisis handbook for everyone who has never quite fulfilled their fantasies, on the tennis court or anywhere else. This is the story of a man of a certain age who has never quite moved on from his youthful fantasies as he goes from sporting zero to sporting hero. And back again. Set against the backdrop of Wimbledon in 2013 when Andy Murray was the first British player to win the championship for decades, unsurprisingly, ‘Andy’ makes an appearance.

Lord Andrew believes that he has won the vote for the club chairmanship: his time has come, his victory is total. But not complete. What's the next challenge for the tennis player who's just won Wimbledon? To win the Australian Open in Oz of course, so our hero bids farewell to his beloved tennis club and sets off on his journey to Melbourne (known in the 'real' world as HM Prison North Sea Camp in Lincolnshire where our hero is serving out his sentence for arson having set fire to the tennis club's racquets.)

A gloriously absurd tennis comedy of delusion, desire and one man’s unstoppable sense of his own greatness. The third in the “Confessions” series, Les Conquêtes Normandes d'un Tennisman Vieillissant (The Norman Conquests of an Ageing Tennis Player) picks up where ‘The Courting Lives’ left off and tracks Andy’s inexorable rise to become the greatest GOAT: or ‘Greatest of All Time’ as they have it in contemporary tennis parlance, by challenging for the French Grand Slam at Roland Garros.

By turns hilarious, unsettling, and unexpectedly tender, this final volume of the Tennis Player Confessions series that began at the Wimbledon tournament comes finally to Flushing Meadows, where the last match is played not with a racket, but with the truth. Written largely as a stage-script, the text shifts into meta-cinema, opening with a drone shot sweeping from the River Mersey to a hospice ward. As reality blurs into dreams, surveillance drones hum through the corridors and Andy is forced to confront what age means in a world that so easily discards its heroes.