Cameron Norrie, Harriet Dart edge through in Battle of Brits against Jack Draper, Katie Boulter

It’s rare to see a doubles match on Centre Court during the first week of Wimbledon. But it’s not every day you say good-bye to the best player your nation has seen since the stylishly Slam-winning days of Fred Perry himself. On Thursday, that player, Andy Murray, joined his brother, Jamie—himself a two-time Wimbledon mixed champion—for an elegiac late-afternoon spin through the old stadium, and a tribute led by Sue Barker afterward.

But Thursday wasn’t all about the past at the Championships. This was a Brit-centric day all around. It was fitting that, at the same time Murray was beginning his farewell tour on Centre Court—he’ll play at least one more mixed match with Emma Raducanu—four of his putative successors were doing battle against each other on the other show court, No. 1. Katie Boulter and Harriet Dart, the No. 1 and No. 2 British women, respectively, went first. They were followed by Jack Draper and Cam Norrie, who are also No. 1 and No. 2.

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Maybe the pressure of defending the top spot in front of the home folks was too much, because in both cases the lower-ranked player triumphed over the higher. One of the matches was a lesson; the other was internecine warfare.

The war came first. Boulter and Dart are both 27, have being competing for years, and are Billie Jean King Cup teammates. Boulter has had the better career, and the better of their rivalry. She was 6-1 against Dart coming into this match, and ranked 71 spots higher. Their relationship has been described as “frosty,” as relationships between lifelong competitors can be.

WATCH: Cameron Norrie edges past countryman Jack Draper in Wimbledon second round | MATCH POINT

But a match of this magnitude has a way of piling all the pressure on the better player’s shoulders. It’s like a team that has dominated another team all season, and now must face them in a single-elimination game in the playoffs. No matter how many times Boulter had beaten Dart in the past, they could all be negated if she lost to her at the only British tournament that really matters.

So it wasn’t a surprise that, in this tense atmosphere, neither player could hold onto a lead. Boulter won the first set 6-4, then nosedived as Dart ran away with the second 6-1 and went up 4-2 in the third. Then it was Dart’s turn to stumble. After losing the next three games, she broke into tears on the changeover and slammed her water bottle to the ground. But she gathered herself to hold serve, and reach the final act of the drama, a 10-point tiebreaker for the match.

There the plot twisted, and the player with the lead collapsed, one last time. Boulter went up 6-2, and again Dart’s tears started to flow. From there, though, Dart hardly missed again, while Boulter couldn’t find the court. She made seven unforced errors over the last 10 points, and Dart walked away a stunned victor, 10-8.

“So fab,” was how a grinning Dart described the experience, while admitting that her record against Boulter was “woeful.”

Later, she talked about her emotions during the match.

“When you’re in the moment and you give everything, and it’s not just about on that court in that moment, it’s everything that goes before the match, months, years of the work that you put in. I just wanted it really, really badly.”

It’s a cliché, but in this case it may have been true: The winner was the woman who wanted it more.

For her part, Boulter took it with a stiff upper lip—or chin.

“It just didn't come off the racquet today,” she said. “I think there are some days when you commit to your shots and they go in. That’s been my tennis a lot of recent. Today wasn’t quite that day.”

“I’ve just to take it on the chin.”

The men’s match that followed was the higher-profile of the two, but by the time the players took the court, the air had gone out of the arena a little, and many of the fans had left for a much-needed break.

Draper and Norrie never quite put that air back into Court 1. The first set was tight and energetically contested, and Norrie won it by playing a flawlessly dynamic tiebreaker. From there, though, Norrie was clearly superior. Even a fist-pump-filled third-set fight from Draper fell flat in the end, and the match finished in anti-climactic straight-set fashion.

Draper, 22, had been the flavor of the month coming into the tournament. He’d won his first title, in Stuttgart; beaten Carlos Alcaraz at Queen’s; taken over the No. 1 ranking in Great Britain; and appeared in Vogue to boot. All of which seemed to make the 28-year-old Norrie more determined to remind the fans that he hadn’t vanished entirely.

Not that he was going to admit anything like that.

“I was more just happy with the level I was playing,” he said. “I was feeling it. I was feeling good. I was really enjoying the tennis, enjoying moving the way I was, hitting the ball the way I was. That’s why I was fired up more than anything.”

It’s hard to disagree: Norrie played with a spark we haven’t seen from him for some time. If it takes a little competition from Draper to bring it out, all the better.

Nobody in British tennis will replace Murray anytime soon, but his successors put on a show he could be proud of on Thursday.