Every June the Wimbledon odds start to take shape. Bookmakers have the leading contenders priced up weeks before the first match on Centre Court.

Followers of tennis betting see much the same group of names with the odds and predictions each year. Irish players almost never feature. It was not always like this.

In the 1890s Irish players won Wimbledon so often that it began to look routine. The last of them was Harold Mahony in 1896. That was 130 years ago.

When Ireland Ruled the Grass

Willoughby Hamilton got things started. A Kildare man, he went the full five sets with William Renshaw in the 1890 final and came out on top. Until then no Irishman had won the men's singles. Lena Rice of Tipperary won the women's title at the same Championships. Thirteen decades on, nobody else from Ireland has matched her.

Joshua Pim, a doctor from Bray, won in 1893. He won again in 1894. Two years later it was Mahony's turn. He had grown up at Dromore Castle near Kenmare and beat Wilfred Baddeley in a five-set final. That made five Irish singles titles in seven years.

Across the Atlantic, Mabel Cahill was winning too. She came from Ballyragget in County Kilkenny and took the US Championships two years running, in 1891 and 1892. Two decades later a Clones man, James Cecil Parke, won the Australasian title. The Irish Championships in Dublin were rated alongside Wimbledon at the time, and RTÉ has a detailed piece on the Irish Championships that once rivalled Wimbledon and the players who made them.

A Long Wait Begins

Then very little. As tennis turned professional, the money and the academies went to bigger countries with better weather. Ireland's climate made outdoor tennis unreliable for much of the year. Indoor courts were few. They still are.

Conor Niland came closest in recent times. At Wimbledon in 2011 he came through qualifying and led Adrian Mannarino 4–1 in the fifth set of their first-round match. A meeting with Roger Federer on Centre Court was the prize. Mannarino fought back to take the set and the match, and it still gets mentioned whenever Irish tennis comes up.

His summer was not over, though. A couple of months later Niland got through qualifying again at the US Open and found Novak Djokovic waiting in round one. Long after retiring he put his years on the tour into a book. The Racket was named William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2024. He is now Ireland's Davis Cup captain.

A Week to Remember at Elm Park

Professional tennis came back to Ireland in June. Elm Park Golf & Sports Club in Dublin put on an ATP Challenger 75 tournament on grass, and nothing at that level had been played here since 2008. The timing suited the players too. Wimbledon qualifying started the following week, so plenty of them were glad of the matches.

"Bringing an ATP Challenger event back to Ireland is a huge moment for Irish tennis," said Tennis Ireland chair Ronan Reid when it was announced.

Conor Gannon, 24 and from Dublin, beat Bernard Tomic in the first round. Tomic was once ranked inside the world's top 20. The match went on for close to three hours and was decided in a third-set tiebreak. Gannon then met Grigor Dimitrov, the former world No. 3, who was rebuilding his ranking at 35 after injury. Dimitrov won 6–2 6–3. Even so, he was seen applauding the Irishman's shots more than once during the match.

Gannon and Charlie Barry also beat the top seeds in the doubles.

The singles title went to Henry Searle of Great Britain, a 20-year-old wildcard from Wolverhampton. Three years earlier he had been Wimbledon boys' champion. In the final on 21 June he needed only two sets to see off Austria's Jurij Rodionov, 6–4 6–2, and it was the first Challenger title of his career. "It's been a great week," he said afterwards.

Building From the Ground Up

Gannon won eight junior ITF titles before going to the University of Tennessee on a tennis scholarship in 2020. He later moved to the University of Memphis. Many Irish and European players now take the American college route, mainly for the coaching and the regular competition.

Tennis Ireland was founded in 1908. It now has almost 180 affiliated clubs and engages with almost 80,000 players. It picks the Irish teams for the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup and still runs the Irish Open Championships.

Most players start at a local club, with Saturday morning junior sessions and midweek league matches. Keeping courts and clubhouses up to standard costs money, and capital grants make a real difference. This week the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport opened applications for a €6 million Arts Capital Investment Fund for arts and community groups. Sports clubs apply through a separate government scheme, the Community Sport Facilities Fund. Any future Irish champion will almost certainly come through a club that has relied on that kind of support.

The Long Road Ahead

Right now no Irish man is ranked inside the world's top 700. Few in Irish tennis would expect that to change quickly. Moving from Challenger events to the main draws of the Grand Slams takes years, and most players never manage it.

Still, 2026 has been a better year than most. There was a Challenger in Dublin, a home player beating a former top-20 name, and an Irish pair knocking out top seeds. Bookmakers will set their Wimbledon prices again next June. Any betting on the tournament is for adults only and best kept modest and within budget. Irish supporters will be looking down those lists all the same, hoping that before long there is a name from home to look for.