Nick Kyrgios will meet Rafael Nadal in the last 16 if he can beat Jiri Vesely in the third round at Wimbledon. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP
As the players wound down their knock-up on Saturday, a dozen Australians - and one Austrian - in the crowd stood up, linked arms and belted out a tuneless, albeit heartfelt, rendition of Advance Australia Fair. Everyone on Court 17 at Wimbledon patiently waited for them to finish, at which point 19-year-old Nick Kyrgios, the object of their affections, shook his head good-naturedly and mumbled a word that sounded like: 'Ridiculous.'
If you have recently attended a sports event featuring Australia - or, say, the running of the bulls in Pamplona or Munich's Oktoberfest - you have probably already met the Fanatics. Created in 1997 as a travelling fan club for Lleyton Hewitt, it is now a 'sport and party tour company' with a membership of 50,000, known for sitting in a block wearing a uniform of yellow shirt, green cap and Oakley sunnies. Collectively, they are a group that makes those Channel 4 Foster's idents look like fly-on-the-wall documentaries.
Australian fans have not had a lot to cheer at Wimbledon since the primes of Pats Cash and Rafter, and Hewitt himself. The emergence of Kyrgios, a former junior world No1, has therefore become a matter of significant national interest. For his third-round match against Jiri Vesely, a 20-year-old Czech, on Saturday, the Fanatics joined the Wimbledon queue on Friday afternoon at 5pm and dashed through the gates to secure ringside seats.
Under sky the colour of congealed bacon fat, Kyrgios made a sleepy start against Vesely, despite the rousing national anthem. He lost his first service game and scarcely laid a racket on Vesely's left-handed bombs before the rain sent them scurrying with the first-set score at 4-2 in the Czech's favour. It was an ominous beginning: Vesely, 6ft 6in and chiselled, has the dead-eyed stare of the clones in Nike's animated World Cup adverts. He was also a junior world champion and accounted for Gaël Monfils earlier in the tournament.
In fairness, it is not just Australians who are becoming excited about Kyrgios. After he won the ATP Challenger event in Nottingham earlier this month, Andy Murray called him 'the next big Aussie star'. Roger Federer flew him out to Switzerland to practise before this year's French Open. On Thursday, when he beat Richard Gasquet, the No13 seed, over five, classic sets - Kyrgios saved nine match points, the most ever in a grand-slam match - in the second round, the Frenchman noted that his opponent was a future top-five player and major winner.
Kyrgios, whose father is Greek and mother is Malaysian, was unfazed by the compliment. 'My goal is to become the No1 player in the world,' he said on Thursday. His game backs up the talk, with a 130mph serve and impatient, violent ground strokes. He certainly looks the part, too: arriving on court wearing pink Beats by Dre headphones, a diamond stud in one ear and showily bouncing the ball between his legs before his ball toss, like the basketball player he might have otherwise been.
The Fanatics certainly played their part in the Gasquet match, where Kyrgios came back from two sets down. Led by Danny the Austrian - 'an honorary Australian' who is so enamoured of Hewitt that he has a tattoo of Rusty's trademark exhortation 'C'mon!' - they had a repertoire of chants to inspire their man during changeovers. These included: 'Hey Nicky, you're so fine/You're so fine you blow my mind, hey Nicky ...' to the tune of Toni Basil's Mickey.
'He loves it; it hypes him up,' said Amy, one of the Fanatics. 'He was singing along with us and laughing.'
It definitely helps me,' Kyrgios agreed after the Gasquet match. 'Knowing they are going to tough it out with me really gets me going. I just enjoy having a big crowd, trying to entertain them a bit. I think you just got to refuse to play bad out there for the crowd. You got to find your best tennis sometimes.'
More reserved, but equally passionate, are the Japanese fans who fill the stands for the matches of the men's No10 seed, Kei Nishikori. There are no chants or matching outfits, but at the end of his matches, there is a scrum for autographs and selfies the like of which you will not see anywhere else at Wimbledon. Nishikori, who has been called Japan's Justin Bieber, is the best tennis player his country has ever produced. As the solitary hope of a nation - with the pressure and media scrutiny that goes with it - he is probably one of the few athletes who know what Murray endures.
If the 24-year-old Nishikori, who was due on court on Saturday for his third-round match against Italy's Simone Bolelli, is shouldering the hopes of 127 million people, he rarely seems flustered by the attention. 'Nishikori's not very typical of Japanese people: he is open-minded and relaxed,' says Kaoru Takeda of Tennis Magazine Japan. 'In Britain, I think you know tennis a little better and you understand that it is not always possible to win. In Japan, it is just: 'Win, win, win!'
'But Nishikori is different. When he plays, he enjoys it. Winning, losing - maybe it is the second matter for him.'
In one sense, Nishikori has already exceeded expectations. As his career took off, he targeted Project 45, with the goal to drop his ranking below that number. That became Project 10, and now his ambition is to win a grand slam title.
At 5ft 10in, he is one of the smallest, slightest players at the top of the men's game, but he makes up for it with dazzling footwork and tactical acuity.
Against the 6ft 8in Frenchman Kenny de Schepper in the first round, Nishikori was bombarded with vicious serves, like an England batsman on a tour to the West Indies in the 1980s. But he took the blows and came through in straight sets.
'You know sushi?' Takeda asks. 'It is about being precise, and that's how Kei plays tennis. He is small, and not very powerful, so he has to be very smart.'
Both Kyrgios and Nishikori will need their support if they are to make deep progress through the bottom half of the draw at Wimbledon. If Nishikori beats Bolelli, he is likely to face Milos Raonic and then Rafael Nadal ... unless Kyrgios defeats Vesely and pulls off the shock of the tournament to this point by beating the Spaniard in the last 16.
One thing's for sure: if Kyrgios does make it, the Fanatics will be there front and centre.
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