‘I forgot just why I loved the game. It became a slog’

Katy Dunne explains to Kate Rowan how sports psychology has helped to conquer her anxiety ‘I put so much pressure on myself to play well at Wimbledon. It made me so low’

As a young girl Katy Dunne took great joy from beating older brother Conor at table tennis. He would get so frustrated that he would break his bat, so he must have got through a lot – according to his little sister, he would only win on average one of 20 games.

With that in mind, it is probably for the best that the Dunne siblings are now pursuing very different sporting goals. Conor abandoned table tennis for cycling, making his Grand Tour debut in last August’s Vuelta a Espana as part of the Aqua Blue Sport team and being crowned Irish national road race champion last Sunday. Katy, meanwhile, is about to make her Wimbledon singles debut as a wild card today against Jelena Ostapenko, the 12th seed from Latvia.

Yet there is still one more competitive twist to their tale, for while Katy, 23, represents Great Britain, Conor has opted to wear the colours of Ireland, the country of their grandparents’ birth. “We don’t really talk about it,” Katy says with a laugh. “Ireland is obviously a big part of our family and me, but I see myself as British.”

Dunne’s determination to be her own woman does not mean she has always had ironclad self-belief. As a junior she would literally shake with nerves during matches, which acted as a severe block to her development.

“With tennis, when you get nervous, you shake and it affects the way you hit a ball,” she says. “I don’t shake any more. But when I played here as a junior I was shaking. I didn’t have the match in perspective, I built it up into something it wasn’t.”

The match in question was Dunne’s first-round encounter in the 2013 Wimbledon girls’ singles with the now retired Romanian Ioana Ducu. Dunne was then ranked among the top 10 juniors and was expected to go far in the competition.

However, she believes focusing too much on the tournament and blowing it out of proportion caused the shaking and ultimately her defeat. She even considered quitting the sport.

“I put so much pressure on myself to play well here, in my head I was putting way too much