Wimbledon upsets showcase new faces,

Elite players have been sent home just four days in

LONdON • There’s a 42-yearold who played Steffi Graf in a Wimbledon semi-final 17 years ago. Name: Kimiko Date-Krumm.

There’s the reigning Wimbledon champion — in juniors — who was supposed to be playing in a far corner of the All England Club and ended up on Centre Court. Name: Eugenie Bouchard.

There’s the man who didn’t get the memo: That serveand-volley players, even on the grass at Wimbledon, can’t post significant victories anymore in pro tennis. Name: Sergiy Stakhovsky.

There’s an unassuming Spaniard who was actually ranked higher than Rafael Nadal but comes and goes with barely a whiff of notice. Name: David Ferrer.

Haven’t heard of them? No worries. They’ ll be hard to avoid over the next week at Wimbledon, where so many of the players who show up at Centre Court and on the TV in your living room — Rafa, Roger, Maria — have already packed up and gone home.

Wednesday was a wild one at the All England Club. Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova got booted. No. 2 Victoria Azarenka, No. 6 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, No. 10 Marin Cilic and four others either quit during their match or didn’t even take the court because of injuries.

Those departures, combined with Rafael Nadal’s exit on the first day, cleared so many big names out of the All England Club that a 1 vs. 2 matchup in the final between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic feels inevitable. On the women’s side, Williams was the clear favourite before the tournament began. By Thursday morning, her odds at the London sports books dropped from 4-11 to 1-4.

“For this to happen once in a while, it brings a little different flavour,” said the famed tennis coach, Nick Bollettieri, who certainly sees no harm in an underdog having his day now and then. “But if it happened all the time, then TVs and sponsors would not pay for it.”

Thursday’s Centre Court schedule illustrated the problem. Without Nadal available, and with Williams taking her turn on Court 1, the featured players in the first two matches on the show court were fourth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska and Juan Martin del Potro. Radwanska’s is a name known only in tennis circles; she did, however, make the final here last year. Del Potro’s claim to fame? He’s the only player left in the men’s draw to win a Grand Slam trophy who isn’t named Djokovic or Murray. “Del Po,” as they call him, won the U.S. Open in 2009.

“In this surface, all the players are difficult,” said del Potro, who beat Canadian Jesse Levine 6-2, 7-6 (7), 6-3 in his second-round match Thursday. “If you have a good serve, you are focused in the

We see some new faces and it’s good for the sport

special moments of the match, you can beat all the players.”

Federer would second that. On Wednesday, with light fading on Centre Court, he faced an unabashed serve-andvolley player in Stakhovsky, the 116th-ranked Ukranian. It’s the kind of tennis that used to win championships here — see, “McEnroe, John” — but as the game has changed, the effectiveness of the quick rush to the net has waned.

Before his upset against Federer, Stakhovsky was best known as the guy who brought his cellphone onto the court at the French Open and snapped a picture of a ball mark to protest a bad line call. Now, he has a defining moment.

Next, the question is: Can he beat Jurgen Melzer? That’s the third-round matchup set for Friday in a now-Federerless section of the draw.

“We see some new faces and it’s good for the sport,” said Djokovic, who won his match American qualifier Bobby Reynolds on Thursday in straight sets.

Williams’ next opponent is Date-Krumm, 42, who is the oldest woman to make the third round of Wimbledon in the open era. Her best run at Wimbledon came in 1996 when she faced Graf in the semi-finals.

This time around, DateKrumm faces a different, albeit every bit as intimidating opponent in Williams, who rolled on by taking out 19-year-old Caroline Garcia of France on Thursday 6-3, 6-2.

With both Azarenka and Sharapova gone from the bottom half of the draw, the lowestseeded player left is No. 8 Petra Kvitova, who won Wimbledon in 2011. Bouchard, the 19-yearold Canadian, is also on that side of the draw and has a Wimbledon trophy to her credit, as well. She took the junior’s championship last year.

On Wednesday, she was warming up, getting ready to play a former No. 1, Ana Ivanovic, on Court 12, capacity 1,089. But when Azarenka announced she was withdrawing, tournament officials moved the Bouchard-Ivanovic match to Centre Court, capacity 15,000.