He was coached at that time by Tony Roche. Roche had turned Ivan from a nearly-man to a Slam winner, but his way of playing on grass was to come to the net after every serve. That’s fine when you have a big lefty serve like Roche did, but I don’t think it was Lendl’s best strategy. Before Lendl, Borg had won Wimbledon by playing a lot of points from the baseline, and Agassi later won it playing nearly all his points from the baseline. Yet Lendl was set on serving and volleying after every point. The problem was that his second serve often wasn’t good enough, and he was often caught in no-man’s land. I guess it was part of his strategy – he had to repeat his style as part of his calculations. It was easier for him to come to the net after every second serve than have to work out when he could come in and when not, and that was his downfall. Well, two finals and a few semis is not a downfall, but that’s why he never won Wimbledon.

In the final against Edberg I was the clear favourite. I had lots of confidence having beaten Cash and Lendl, and I won the first set, even after losing the first three games. That strengthened my belief that I was going to win, but little by little he got back into it.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon and we only played five games before they abandoned play for the day, which created the first Monday final ever. When I won the first set having been 0-3 down and restarting at 2-3, I felt overconfident. Usually you don’t, you have to stay humble, but I had a good record against Edberg, I’d won the title in 1985 and ‘86, and I felt it was natural that I would win this thing again. As a result I was caught totally by surprise on the Monday. My mentality was weak and wrong, and he took advantage, pure and simple. The tiebreak in the second set was the turning point, and by the end he was taking me apart. It was 6-2 in the fourth, and I was beside myself. I thought that was my title, and it wasn’t. It was a sort of wake-up call, and given what was happening in the background, ‘wake-up call’ is a very appropriate expression.

Even though I reached four successive Wimbledon finals, and won one of them, the period 1988–90 was marked by an addiction I developed – and subsequently kicked – to sleeping pills.

I started taking sleeping pills to beat jetlag, but I also took them to beat the pressure. You can find all sorts of justifications for taking sleeping pills. I recognised, fairly, that some people sleep better than others. I’m not a great sleeper in general, travelling all year long across five continents makes you tired, and I was struggling to get sleep before some matches. I convinced myself that taking an occasional sleeping pill wasn’t a problem – that if I couldn’t sleep, I wasn’t giving myself the best chance to perform at my best the next day. That may be legitimate, but I was under pressure and was taking the pills partly for that reason rather than just to be an optimum tennis player. I don’t think I’m the only athlete to have been hooked on sleeping pills, but I’m one of the very few who admit it.

The pressure I felt under stemmed from losing in the 1987 second round. In the general context it was nothing to be ashamed of, and I was still only 19, but the critics, who were looking for trends before they had even started, were happy to suggest that, even if my claim to fame was more than 15 minutes, it might only be limited to 30 minutes at the most. Although I didn’t feel under pressure after losing to Doohan at Wimbledon, the remainder of 1987 went pretty poorly too. After a while I began to feel under pressure again, and I wasn’t coping with it. Expectations got to me, starting with myself, and then everywhere I went I felt frustrated. A year earlier I’d been on top of the world – now there were times when I felt I couldn’t play tennis any more.

One day, I was with the West German Davis Cup team, and our doctor, the very well-respected Professor Joseph Keul (he was also the German Olympic team doctor), was chatting with us. We were almost joking when we asked him if he had a cure for jetlag. To our surprise, he said it was easy; he had a pill that most athletes take because ‘it isn’t that strong’. The pill was called Planum, and I don’t know where he got the idea that it wasn’t that strong – if you took a Planum now, within 15 minutes you wouldn’t be able to walk out of the room by yourself – it’s that strong. But we believed him, we spent a lot of time in planes, so when you have a 10-hour flight and you have to sleep, it’s very tempting to take one, even if it meant that within a quarter of an hour we couldn’t make our way to the washroom unaided.

Today I know how wrong and dangerous it is, zooming yourself to sleep like that, but in those days I didn’t know and it was so attractive. Yet it drains you. After a couple of difficult nights you get weak and soft. Stupidly, I also took a Planum the night before certain important matches, not realising that the recovery time was much longer than I thought. That’s why I was such a slow starter in some matches, and while I don’t want to take anything away from Stefan for beating me fair and square in the 1988 Wimbledon final, I think the pills had something to do with it. I wasn’t sleeping great on the Friday night, and then again on Saturday night, and then having the final postponed to Monday meant three nights with sleeping pills. That makes your mind weak and makes you unclear about what you want to do the next day, and I think it affected me. The 1988 final was the only match I lost at Wimbledon that was interrupted. Losing in that Wimbledon final taught me a lesson – I became aware of the dangers of sleeping pills, and I cut down on them. But I continued to use them for another three years, and they were partly responsible for another Wimbledon final defeat a couple of years later.

I was determined not to make the same mistake the following year, but I very nearly didn’t have a chance to make it to the 1989 final, let alone challenge for it. Fortunately, the rain saved me.