The future of British tennis is - Laura Ashley. Wait a second, it’s Laura Robson, isn’t it? That is true enough, but as the 14-year-old was selecting her dress for last night’s Wimbledon Champions’ Dinner, moves were accelerating to persuade Mike Ashley, the owner of Newcastle United and Dunlop Slazenger, to become the significant Sugar Daddy for Robson and all who have been inspired by her victory in the girls’ singles championship.

Ashley invested £140 million of his personal fortune to buy the Barclays Premier League club a year ago but has been dogged in recent weeks by suggestions - strenuously denied - that he is willing to sell if the price is right. The LTA, having said that the sport in Britain is up for sale “lock, stock and barrel”, has signed Dunlop Slazenger as its official equipment supplier. It is understood that overtures are continuing for that involvement to become all-embracing.

Roger Draper, the LTA chief executive, does not expect to land the lead partner until next year at the earliest. He was front and centre on No 1 Court on Saturday, rubbing his hands at the prospect of Robson becoming the youthful image of women’s tennis in Britain. Her progress has been the work of many.

She started at 7 at the Sutton Junior Academy in Surrey, spent more than two years being coached by Alan Jones at the Hazelwood Club in North London, six months with Carl Maes, the Belgian, when the present LTA head of women’s tennis was coaching at the Riverside Club, and further time with Olga Morozova at Win Tennis, the academy at Bisham Abbey in Buckinghamshire. The LTA provides funding to those coaching centres but does not actually run them.

A year ago, visiting an academy in Amsterdam, Robson’s mother, Kathy, watched a session given by Martijn Bok, a Dutch coach and immediately recognised that Bok was the man to coach her daughter.

Robson trains with Bok at the LTA’s National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, southwest London, where she also works under Nigel Sears, the head coach of women’s tennis, and Maes.

“Kathy asked me if I would work with Laura for a year and we made an agreement,” Bok, a bespectacled 35-year-old, said yesterday. “It is an extremely private deal. I saw right away that there was a lot of potential in Laura, a girl with a very strong character who had trouble staying emotionally under control, as you saw in the second set [of her win over Noppawan Lertcheewakarn, of Thailand, on Saturday].

“It was hurting her, and we did a lot of talking about it. She lost some painful matches because of it, but this is a learning curve. We have worked a lot on the physical side with Steve [Kotzee, an LTA physical trainer] because at the beginning she was quite slow and struggled if the ball came back to her too quickly. I wanted more variation on her serve as well, and that she was not as one-dimensional in her approach.”

Bok and Robson will head back to clay this week, to work on that development. Her management group has said that she will not be doing any media until January. “It can be overwhelming,” Bok said. On her qualities, Bok is forthright. “She is very relaxed,” he said. “On the women’s circuit there are not many friends, players are like islands, there is jealousy and we have to guard against that, but Laura is a social person and she is competitive, but she wants to win fairly.”

In the next few weeks, Robson will play nonmoney tournaments in the Netherlands and then, in the autumn, should appear in a couple of $25,000 ITF events on clay. It is all going to be low key in an attempt to dampen expectations. Peering out of the windows at Wimbledon yesterday, dampened expectations were all the rage.

Courting success: Junior highs

Of the girls’ singles winners at Wimbledon in the past ten years, none has gone on to win a grand-slam tournament. The last player to achieve that feat was Amélie Mauresmo, who won the girls’ title in 1996 and the senior title ten years later. Caroline Wozniacki and Agnieszka Radwanska are proof, however, that the junior title is a good indication of potential, with both achieving top30 WTA rankings only a couple of years after joining the senior tour.

Laura Robson might have been better advised to lose the final on Saturday. Dinara Safina (2001), Kim Clijsters (1998), Ana Ivanovic (2004) and Maria Sharapova (2002) all finished runner-up in the girls’ singles at SW19

Venus Williams beat her sister, Serena, 7-5, 6-4 on Saturday in a singles final that nailed all those conspiracy theories (Neil Harman writes). It was tennis fair and true, monstrously good in places, laughably uncontrolled in others.

There was sportsmanship, showmanship, even acts of sisterly grace, and finally a victor who joined Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf as one of those who have won this championship five times in the past 40 years. Which makes Venus a phenomenal player, for she has dropped only three sets in those five finals. She has lost to no one else in the final bar her sister.

The pair combined later to win the doubles against Lisa Raymond, of the United States, and Samantha Stosur, from Australia, but it was the singles that mattered. “It was fantastic,” Navratilova said.