Laura Robson the 'new darling' of Court No 1

It was much, much more than a tennis match. It was seeing the future made flesh. It was a wondrous Wimbledon welcome to the surprise new arrival in our national sporting family. Let's hope we are a long time together. For after yesterday,
Laura Robson has become our darling overnight.

She is gorgeous, with a lovely, open, bright and smiling face, and a tennis game to match. This week's victories had seen the great and good pronounce Laura the real deal but once outed as Britain's latest big new hope, only victory against the difficult-to-spell, let alone pronounce Noppawan Lertcheewakarn of Thailand was going to be good enough. It took three sets. There were a couple of moments of teenage strop as Laura lost the second set but she came through like the winner she is said to be. We could do with a lot more of this.

At only 14, she is already a poised young lady, having in the past year grown to 5ft 7in and upped her serve to well over 100 mph. She has a beautiful open backswing and hits flowing winners off either wing. Her opponent was a very different type of athlete - two years older maybe, shorter, chunkier and strangely double-fisted on either side.

Laura broke her in the second game and raced to 3-0. It was not entirely easy because the Thai girl was a scrapper in the rallies and our new darling still has quite a way to go. "She doesn't move well enough yet," one of the experts said. Maybe not, but she served out to close the set and set us all thinking about how we are going to accommodate her into our sporting consciousness.

For all her apparent calm, she said she had struggled to keep her composure as she stepped out onto Court One. "I didn't feel relaxed and composed. I thought I was going to be sick when I walked onto court because there were so many people watching."

There was a strange mood in the crowd - not quite like watching a proper match. It was a mixture of curiosity and anticipation. For what was in front of us was an image which was going to become familiar in the retina. Laura Robson poised at the baseline, the pigtail neat behind the white sun visor, the head bowed in concentration as the right hand bounced the ball before the service action. She is 14. There could be 10, crikey, maybe even 20 years of this.

Then not just our concentration wavered; Noppawan is a gutsy little fighter and she began to dig out the winners as Laura wilted and throwing her racket to the ground with a screech of schoolgirl anguish.

"In the second set I went a bit mad but got it back together and managed to win," she said afterwards.

At the time there was a feeling of slight embarrassment that we should have so indulged ourselves with hope that we were now blaming a 14-year-old girl for not winning a final at the first time of asking. But in 1990, I remember watching a 14-year-old Jennifer Capriati getting to the fourth round in the main draw.

If Laura Robson really was what Billie Jean King and the rest of them had said in the morning papers, she needed to win this. The second point of the third set was a metronomic rally which finally saw the Thai girl weaken. Laura was on the roll again. Noppawan was broken. The mood changed from complaint to realisation. Here was a new princess. We wanted to hail her as our own.

While this victory was hers, she was forced to admit defeat in her pursuit of Russian heart-throb Marat Safin.

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Laura Robson revealed she had wanted to attend tonight's champions' ball with him. But it was not to be, Safin declining. "It was really nice," said Laura. "Unfortunately he's turned me down but I think he's a bit old for me anyway."

We had been witnesses to history. A table draped in the Union Jack was brought on and Ann Jones came out to present the prizes. Laura came out to receive the trophy. She was ushered across to pose for the photographers and then to parade round the court for spectators to see her. She didn't really know how to do it, clutching the cup like a 14-year-old does with a 'just look at me' smile at a prize-giving.

She will learn - and so, we hope, will we.