Nick Kyrgios plays the villain perfectly, but deep down he just wants to be loved

In the mid-90s, when the internet was all prairie-land as far as you could see, there was a genuine feeling this new frontier was a force for enlightenment. Here was a space where the shared human essence could coalesce and commune, a pure shore on which the future would be crafted by gentle, unhurried humans with bulbous green Apple Macintoshes, concerned only with upcycling blogs and really cool typefaces and artisan bagel houses in Prague.

The reality has of course been a little different. It turns out our shared human essence isn’t a mild dove-like thing, but is instead an ambient swamp of fury, inanity and throbbing human brain gristle. The soundtrack to that collective consciousness is not the music of the spheres but an endless spawn of enraged avatars saying things like “try crypto now bro” and “wake up sheeple”, a billion voices shouting into the void about grammar and football and celebrities, all of it preserved in the digital eternity like toxic microplastics. So apologies, The Future. It seems we may have blown it.

This is a roundabout way of getting on to Nick Kyrgios, who plays in the third round at Wimbledon against Stefanos Tsitsipas on Saturday, and who has already been on various levels the most intriguing figure of the opening week.

On Tuesday Kyrgios grizzled his way past Paul Jubb, then dished up one of the most entertaining press conferences of the sporting year. On Thursday he was fined £8,000 for on court dick‑housery, but only after a thrillingly pure straight‑sets win against Filip Krajinovic. In between Kyrgios has been hoist as the embodiment of all that is graceless and wrong, and enshrined once again as that essential figure, The Bad Boy Of Tennis.

Is any of this real? On court Kyrgios may