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Isner - tongue out, sweating, mind addled by 10 hours of tennis - heads for the locker room, while a supporter pleads with him to shoot her now

• Mahut wants to come off now; the light is almost gone. But the official orders the pair to play two more games. "We want more! We want more!" chant the survivors on Court 18. I'm taking this as proof that they have gone insane.

  Good grief!
 
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• 4.05pm: The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull. It's tennis's equivalent of Waiting For Godot, in which two lowly journeymen comedians are forced to remain on an outside court until hell freezes over and the sun falls from the sky. Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they're watching the football. So the players stand out on their baseline and belt aces past each-other in a fifth set that has already crawled past two hours. They are now tied at 18-games apiece.
• On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.
• Ooh, I can see the football out of the corner of my eye. England still 1-0 up!

• 6pm: The score stands at 34-34. In order to stay upright and keep their strength, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut have now started eating members of the audience. They trudge back to the baseline, gnawing on thigh-bones and sucking intestines. They have decided that they will stay on Court 18 until every spectator is eaten. Only then, they say, will they consider ending their contest.

• 7.10pm: It's 43-43 and John Isner is serving to make it 44-43, after which Nicolas Mahut will serve to make it 44-44. I'm indebted to the commenter who explained that Nicolas Mahut recently knocked the sensor of the net and that this is why the umpire climbed down off his chair and started slapping the cord with his hand, with his mouth hanging open and vomit all down the front of his shirt. For a moment I had hoped the slapping might have been his way of summoning the angel we've all been talking about, the one that will come down and usher the contestants up to their Eternal Rest. But no. Turns out it was just something to do with the net sensor.
• Isner moves to 44-43. Mahut now serving to make it 44-44. Fingers crossed he makes it!

• 8.05pm: In the stands, a woman is laughing. She laughs long and hard and her laugh is the sort of ghastly yodel you normally hear in antique horror movies about Victorian insane asylums. "Wa-la-ha-la-wah," she goes. "Wa-la-ha-la-ha-la!" Will nobody drag her out? Call in the goons in white coats. Get this woman to a lobotomy!

  Mahut is serving to make it 51-51. Wouldn't you know it, he does. He makes it to 51-51, finishing up with an ace.