Lust in translation

The Diary woke yesterday to what seemed like dreadful news. “Unas palabras para anunciar el fin de una extraordinaria aventura,” went the tweet. Was one of its favourite players quitting the game?

Panicking, it hit Twitter’s “translate” button: “A few words to announce the end of an extraordinary adventure.” No more Garbine Muguruza! Every year at Wimbledon the Diary falls a little bit in love with one of the women players and never so than in 2017

when the willowy Venezuelan won the title.

“Te retiras ???? ” shrieked one fan, clearly just as distraught. Another tried to console himself with the fact a second career would instantly open up for Mugga, one that perhaps was her destiny all along. She could take that megawatt smile of hers into modelling full-time.

A check with a Spanish colleague, however, revealed that Muguruza is merely saying goodbye to her current coach. The Diary admits that some kind of new direction is probably necessary. It saw her first-round defeat to Brazil’s Beatriz Haddad Maia when, frankly, she played like Zoolander – and what’s more Zoolander in a quandary over whether to go with the look Ben Stiller models in that very funny movie called “Blue Steel”. Or the other one, “Le Tigre”.

Muguruza calls herself Spanish now but was born in Caracas, a place dear to Scottish hearts and especially lovelorn ones. You’ll remember Gregory’s Girl, an even funnier film than Zoolander, and the closing scene where the eponymous hero’s buddies Andy and Charlie take to one of Cumbernauld’s zillion roundabouts in the hope of hitching to Venezuela’s capital where, they’ve just learned, the women dramatically outnumber the men. They hold up a cardboard sign but tragically it reads “Caracus”.