He picked up another code violation, there were a fair few choice words on court and he got pretty stroppy when asked about it afterwards, but Nick Kyrgios had some justification for suggesting that the important thing to take away from his five set meeting with Dustin Brown had been the entertainment factor.

The individual highlight of the match from the German whose playing style owes much more to his Jamaican heritage than any Teutonic efficiency drew tribute, of sorts, from Kyrgios for the man who can perhaps be considered the maverick’s maverick.

“He hit one through the legs dropshot, made me feel horrendous,” he said.

“He was hitting volleys that are spinning back over. There were times out there where you literally don't want to play. You just want to put the racquet down.

“That's what you get from him. He's going to hit jumping backhands that are going to hit the fence, but then he's going to hit three of the greatest volleys that you've ever seen.

“I think it's important to have a guy like him playing. He's completely different to me. He's completely different to Gael Monfils. He's a different athlete. He's a great athlete. He's a great talent and a good guy as well.”

While rain delays meant their match ended close to eight hours after it had been due to start, the playing time for five sets was only a little more than two hours and the temperamental Australian claimed to have enjoyed a match that was on a knife edge to the end.

“You know, as soon as we got out there, the crowd started getting into it,” Kyrgios observed.

“It's actually easy to play. Makes you feel kind of relaxed out there. There's some patches of the match where he's playing unbelievable, and some patches where he's not playing great. It's hard to get rhythm.

“It really only came down to a couple points. Both of us got lucky at times. Both of us sort of played well at times. Really came down to a couple points. Could have been him sitting in the chair just like me.”

Kyrgios’s compatriot Matt Barton meanwhile rather cruelly exited the tournament at the hands of big-serving American John Isner after three tie-breaks having, extraordinarily, had his serve broken just once in the course of three qualifying matches and two rounds in the main draw.