Wimbledon Betting: Boris is back home and ready to reign again

Boris Becker likes what he's seeing as Novak Djokovic starts Wimbledon

Novak Djokovic is tapping into Boris Becker's memory banks to help his Wimbledon campaign. Ralph Ellis covered Becker's playing days and believes the tournament favourite couldn't have chosen a better man to help him regain the title.

Boris Becker used to talk about how he owned Wimbledon. The Centre Court, where he won his first title at the tender age of 17, was his home. And the moment when he first stepped on the grass each year sent tingles down his spine.

I can remember interviewing him at Queen's towards the end of his career as he looked ahead to another attempt to turn three Championships into four.

"Of money, I have plenty," he said. "I don't want for that. What drives me now is to be a champion again, and the feeling of taking on the guys who are coming along and still being the best."

It didn't happen. It was 1995, and that year he fought his way to the final, winning an epic semi against Andre Agassi, only to become another notch on the belt of Pete Sampras. He sat in the interview room afterwards looking shattered, knowing that after taking the first set he'd had nothing left in the tank to halt the man who now owned the court that was once his domain.

When he finally hung up his racquet it always seemed a waste that he used his vast knowledge and experience only to help TV viewers understand what they were seeing. He brought insight and depth to the BBC's coverage, telling you not only the tactics and the technique but most crucially the mindset which separated the champions from the also-rans.

This year it is different. There's no Boris on the Beeb, but he is here on the courts of SW19 in a role as coach to Novak Djokovic. And if the way his star pupil started the tournament is any guide, it might just be that he will make it all the way to be a winner once more.

At the start of 2012 Djokovic looked like a man who needed no help from anybody. He won the Australian Open to collect his third Grand Slam title in a row, and was on course to be the first man since Rod Laver to hold all four. But when Rafael Nadal beat him in Paris, the doubts began to creep in. Since then he's played five more finals, and lost all but one of them, and been beaten in two semis and a quarter-finals too.

He's been working with Becker since the turn of the year, searching for the details to make a difference, and if there is a time for it to work it is now. He certainly started right, wiping away the potentially dangerous Andrey Golubev in less than 90 minutes. The way Becker celebrated on court, taking selfies, suggested he'd told his pupil to make an opening statement and things had gone exactly to plan.

Djokovic is 2.89/5 favourite to hold aloft the trophy in two weeks time, but on the evidence of his first day success he would be worth backing if he was only even money. Just as Andy Murray learned from the way Ivan Lendl once handled the big occasions, so the Serb can now tap into Becker's bank of big match experience.

Boris might not own Wimbledon as a player any more. But the signs are that he could yet stake another claim to the courts that were once his kingdom.