TENNIS in DEPTH.

Venus Williams expressed her admiration for the persistence of questioning about her latest accessory, bandages on the calf and thigh of her left leg during her rout of Kateryna Bondarenko. But she navigated all questions coyly. Labeling the bandages as “just for support,” she said, “What happened was that I needed some support, and then I went and got the support, and then I wore it in the match. I’ll be wearing it in doubles too. So it’s working out. I mean, I think all the players might start wearing it because it’s so supportive.” . . . Williams and her sister Serena, the defending doubles champions, won their first match, 6-3, 6-3, over Virginie Razzano and Aravane Rezai of France. . . .

When one has been the queen of England for 57 years, one can weather some serious tennis droughts, and so Elizabeth II, who last attended Wimbledon to present the women’s singles trophy to Virginia Wade in 1977, gamely sent a letter to the All England Club on Wednesday. An official delivered it to Andy Murray at his practice court, and it congratulated the world’s No. 3 player on winning the Queen’s Club tuneup and wished him good luck at Wimbledon. Having tweeted that he “put it in its own pile away from the bills,” Murray later said, “Yeah, it’s surprising. I mean, you don’t get that every day.”

Evidently, Wimbledon patrons of a certain torpor had been parking at St. Mary’s Church just down Church Road from the All England Club. Evidently, they had been paying £20 — or about $32 — to avoid walking a distance. Evidently, they would pay and then steer through trees, hedges and, um, the church cemetery, to find their spaces, as shown in a National Pictures photo of a BMW stashed between two rows of headstones. Evidently, this did not persist after it got some attention, but it did afford a sterling opportunity to one headline writer at the London tabloid Metro: “Going to Wimbledon? Over My Dead Body.”

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