“The only way to play better, the only way to give you more chance to win another match, is to practice hard, to practice well, to accept, to be patient, and to always try to fight,” said Stan Wawrinka moments after his trajectory-changing 1-6 7-6 7-6 7-5 victory over sixth seed Grigor Dimitrov to a raucous crowd on centre court.

Despite the spectacle of a three-time slam champion and a player who ranked as high as #3 this year duking out a Wimbledon first round on centre court, what unfolded was a strange contest. Wawrinka began the match widely expected to lose and it started as expected, with a flash-in-the-pan first set.

But after Dimitrov’s faultless first set, his level fell off a cliff and he found himself far closer to Wawrinka’s level. As always, the similar weaknesses let him down. He lost rhythm on his serve. His backhand disintegrated. Aggression evaded him in favor of nerves and insecurity.

Wawrinka, emboldened by the clear show of frailty, began to find his range. He took more risks on his groundstrokes, his backhand down the line whistling. When he fell down 5-3 in the third set until for one of the first times this year he still seemed to back himself in a tough spot and broke back with a passing shot. From that point, Wawrinka kept his nose fractionally ahead and Dimitrov was left only to exhibit his increasingly expert ability to criticize himself.

“I can't really think straight right now just because I'm shocked in myself, frustrated, pissed, anything you can possibly think.”

Throughout 2018, it’s hard to imagine that Stan Wawrinka’s patience hasn’t been tested as much as ever in his career. At the most difficult point of his career - as he recovered from his most significant injury setback - his coach Magnus Norman decided to part ways, and he had to fight to retain his services.

Wawrinka spent 6 months on the sidelines following last year’s Wimbledon, only to rush back to the courts in Australia, desperate to resume his career, and learnt that his knee still wasn't right. He was 5-9 in 2018 and his only event with two successive wins occurred at a small tournament in Sofia, Bulgaria, where any momentum from the feat was ended by an unceremonial defeat to 129-ranked Mirza Basic and the recurrence pain in his knee.

The string of losses surely catalyzed a string of questioning whether his knee would be the same, whether he would be the same. The most jarring moment of all was surely the most recent one when he faced Andy Murray on the grounds of Eastbourne. After their 5-set 2017 French Open semi-final, both men were forced to step away from the tour after Wimbledon.

Wawrinka had returned to the court for six months while Murray was back in his second match after nearly a year, but no unknowing onlooker would have guessed this. Murray looked much further ahead in his progress after injury recovery after one match than Wawrinka after half a year. While the Scot played a slick, astute match, Wawrinka was far off the pace and managed only 4 games in the 6-1 6-3 defeat. It wasn’t far from his mind on Monday.

“Mentally I went down way too quickly in Eastbourne. Was really wrong match in many, many ways. With a good talk with Magnus, we couldn't find what was really the problem, and try to change that.”

To be a professional tennis player is to understand that this progress isn’t linear and that a great victory one day means very little the next. The process is very rarely linear. But, at the very least, it was nice to see a champion, backhands whistling, at least temporarily overcome his current circumstances to secure a significant win.