Eaton Beaten But British Outsider Gives His Barmy Army Plenty to Shout About

Chris Eaton's unbeaten grand slam record, which extended all the way back to Tuesday, was broken by the resolute Dmitry Tursunov on an excited and sometimes hysterical Court One yesterday evening. The odyssey of the world's 661st-ranked player from East Horsley in Surrey came to an end at the brutal hands of the 25th seed who refused, implacably, to participate in the fun of the occasion.

The Team Eaton cheerleaders, with "I love Chris Eaton" scrawled but at this stage not tattooed on their arms, screamed with approval every time their new hero won a point. But there were not many of those after the first set as Tursunov won 7-6, 6-2, 6-4 in two hours of mostly one-sided tennis.

But if Eaton, 20, felt as though he was a trespasser on such an exalted stage as this he did not show it in the first set, in which his powerful serve and formidable volleying surprised his opponent, who is ranked 33rd in the world. He is a serve-volley man in an era of baseliners, but that was the way he had beaten Boris Pashanski, the world No110, in the first round, when he thundered down 26 aces, and it would have been wrong to change here.

Eaton managed another 13 aces but it was not enough. He had stepped into a class of tennis which he had never experienced before and only Tursunov's reputation for unpredictability and occasionally imploding offered the Englishman any chance at all. Eaton, who lives with his parents, still leaves Wimbledon the richer by almost £20,000 and with a comparable surge in his following because of his good looks and the attacking style of his tennis. He received £17,000 just for reaching the second round and the rest of the money came from his appearance in the doubles, where he and Alexander Slabinsky lost to the top seeds in the first round.

"I don't feel great right now," he said yesterday. "It hurts. I lost and I feel pretty upset about it. I did what I could do. I didn't serve as well as I can, which makes it difficult because that's the best part of my game. The support was amazing. Those guys were making so much noise."

He was once again kept waiting. On Tuesday he had mooched about until 7pm before he could get on Court Three and yesterday it was after six before he started his match. But Eaton, who started playing tennis at the age of six and who has spent much of his brief tennis career exploring such remote places as Uzbekistan, Israel and Exmouth, soon looked at home. His service was not broken in the first set and in the eighth and 10th games he held to love against an opponent whose put-away forehands have troubled some of the world's leading players.

But once that set had gone to a tie-break Tursunov was the only one who looked a winner. He went into a 3-0 lead and took the tie-break 7-2 to take the set in 46 minutes.

When he broke in the first game of the second set, and again in the fifth to go 4-1 up, the destiny of the tie was no longer in doubt even to Eaton's wildest supporters. And there were quite a number of them. Including qualifying and pre-qualifying this was the Briton's eighth match - more than Roger Federer needed to win the title last year.

Tursunov is an interesting cove, a Russian who is based in California, has an American accent and uses words like "gotten". He seems to have something against students from Reed's School in Cobham, which Tim Henman and Jamie Delgado attended before Eaton: he had a 5-2 head-to-head record against Henman, whom he beat here in 2005.

He writes a highly popular blog for the ATP website and once raved about smashing rackets. "Smashing a tennis racket is like having rough sex," he says. "You know, some rackets just like it rough. I think more of the top players should be encouraged to smash their rackets."

At 25 he has been a professional for eight years and has competed at Wimbledon since 2004, never failing to reach the third round. He made the last 16 here in 2005 and 2006. He says playing at Wimbledon is like playing in a museum and seemed daunted when someone asked him before yesterday's game how he felt about taking on the whole nation. "I didn't realize the whole nation was competing," he said, faux-serious. Yesterday, though, he was really serious.