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How about we all agree on Arthur’s Seat? I’d love to claim it but the honour belongs to a quick-witted friend of a friend, the literary agent Geraldine Cooke. Maybe it doesn’t have the same alliteration as Henman Hill or Murray Mound but you’d say Fery’s Foothill does him an injustice given how high he’s risen this week. With his straight-sets victory over Flavio Cobolli, Fery has become the first wildcard player to make the men’s Wimbledon semi-finals since 2001. He is, even more extraordinarily, only the fourth player to do it at any grand slam in the Open era, after Goran Ivanisevic, Henri Leconte and Jimmy Connors.

By the time they’ve finished doing the maths, Fery, who only broke into the world’s top 200 last year, will be inside the top 25 and the highest-ranked British player.

You’re about to know all about him, if you don’t already. You’ve maybe heard that he was born in France and that his father is a multimillionaire hedge fund manager. You might know, too, that his mother is a former professional player who used to work at the Lawn Tennis Association, and that he had a tennis scholarship to Stanford, where he spent three years playing on the US college circuit and studying science, technology and society. No two ways about it, he is a very privileged kid. Maybe that’s why he fits right in on Centre Court, the only arena in sport where play is regularly held up by the popping of champagne corks.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the umpire said at one point, “please enjoy the drinks but wait for the players before opening the bottles, thank you.”

All of which, let’s admit it, brings out the worst in all us inverse snobs. Fery’s already being called a nepo baby. It’s true that Fery had every advantage to get where he is, and it’s true, too, that none of it is much use to him at all now he is here. You can have every advantage, but it isn’t necessarily going to help at deuce against the world No 10 when it’s 30C, your shirt is wet through with sweat and you’re facing the sort of whipcrack forehands Cobolli is armed with. Fery has been the underdog in every match he’s played since these championships began, even if he doesn’t seem to have realised it.

Which is why so many punters don’t like him either. Tennis is the second-biggest sports betting market in the world after football, and the internet is full of people who spend their time parsing the statistics to try to make sense of the bets. The trouble is that when you go by the data then nothing much about Fery’s run through these championships makes a whole lot of sense. There are no nuggets in the reams of information Wimbledon publishes that explain exactly what he’s got going on. Instead there are plenty that explain why the bookies gave him such long odds in all these matches he’s won.

Fery is ranked lower than most, is shorter than most, and his serve is weaker than most. He wins more points with his returns than the average player in the field here, and, by the metrics, that’s about all he has going for him. What’s happening here is about the things that are much harder to measure, the decisions he makes, the way he handles himself after making mistakes, his bloody refusal to know when he’s beaten, and his absolute conviction that despite what you, me and everyone else watching thinks, he is a match for anyone, even though he had never even played a five-set match until he arrived here last week.

It’s about his symbiotic relationship with the fans here, who now roar for him as loud as they ever did for the four British men who made it to the semi-finals before him during the modern era, and it’s about the dizzying sense of momentum that’s carried him through the tournament.

It’s only when you dig a little deeper into the numbers that you begin to pick up a few clues. Fery wins three-quarters of his points when the score is 30-30 or 40-40, and wins 10% more of the decisive points on his return than the championship average. He seems to be able to find his best in the moments that matter most, and when the men he’s playing against are just beginning to waver, whether that’s by fighting his way back from two games down in the second set, or serving his first ace on the opening point of a tie-break to take a 1-0 lead, or saving break point when he was about to go a game down in the third.

Or maybe none of this needs to make any sense. Hell, he’s not the only mentally tough player in this game. Maybe it’s just that there’s something in the air at Wimbledon this fortnight. It isn’t clouds – the bright blue skies will burn your eyes – but whatever it is, it’s working for him, and with him, and it’s carried him deeper into this championship than anyone imagined was possible. You just hope he carries on running before he stops to look down and realises there’s no ground beneath him any more.