As the hours tick by before the start of The Championships, the great and the good are poring over the draw to identify potential champions and possible banana skins for the established superstars.

What will make the difference?

And to whom?

And what of Rafael Nadal’s place in all of this?

To be clear: the world No.4 and the two-time champion on these courts is in prime position to add to his tally of trophies.

Why? Because of his draw?

Well, he cannot meet Novak Djokovic, his great rival for these past 16 years, until the final. That is a plus point.

But if results go according to the seedings, he would face Lorenzo Sonego in the third round, Marin Cilic in the fourth, Felix Auger-Aliassime in the quarter-finals and either Stefanos Tsitsipas or Matteo Berrettini in the semi-finals – not to mention Francisco Cerundolo in his first match on Tuesday.

That is no walk in the park so, no, it is not the draw that helps him.

Is it that he is the only man on his side of the draw who has actually won here that helps? Not really.

No one not named Nadal, Djokovic, Roger Federer or Andy Murray has won in SW19 since Lleyton Hewitt in 2002 – and in all that time, Nadal has claimed the title only twice, the last time being in 2010.

Compared with his 14 titles at Roland-Garros, two Wimbledon trophies seem scant reward for a lifetime of effort.

No, what makes Nadal so dangerous this year is the fact that he is recovering from an injury – and, really, that is not as daft as it sounds.

When he landed in Melbourne at the start of the year, Nadal had no idea what to expect.

Just a few weeks before, he’d thought he had no hope of even making the trip, much less playing.

A chronic condition affecting his left foot had flared up in the Roland-Garros semi-final last summer and that was his season all but over (he played two matches more that August and then stopped for the rest of the year).

By January, he was just hoping the ailing foot would hold up for a few rounds.

And then he won the Australian Open.

That set our hero off on a run of success the like of which he had never experienced before.

Unbeaten for 21 matches, a run that earned him three titles, he was stopped only in the Indian Wells final by Taylor Fritz and a worrying pain in his chest.

That turned out to be a stress fracture in one of his ribs and it cost him almost two months’ playing time.

Back in action on the clay in Madrid, he began to feel his game falling into place again.

Sure enough, he lost to Carlos Alcaraz in the quarter-finals but he knew he was starting to play well.

On, then, to Rome but just when life was looking bright again, his left foot started to hurt in his second match.

By the time he got to Roland-Garros two weeks later, he was dropping heavy hints about retirement.

Each match, he said, could be his last. The pain was unbearable and it was affecting his daily life, not just his tennis.

And then he won Roland-Garros.

Here he has walked – unaided – into Wimbledon just three weeks after a surgical procedure to alleviate that pain.

He underwent a radiofrequency ablation (RFA) – basically, radio waves sent down a fine needle and into the nerves in his foot around the navicular bone. This burns part of the nerve, causing a lesion, and that lesion blocks the pain signals being sent back to the brain.

The condition – Mueller-Weiss syndrome – is not cured but the pain is controlled, albeit for only a few months up to a couple of years.

But it means that, for now, Nadal can play.

When he left Paris, he said he was going to try this RFA procedure and hope for the best.

Now he is settled into Wimbledon, he has been hard at work on the practice courts and we are back to where we were before the Australian Open and Roland-Garros: watching a 36-year-old former champion with an injured foot preparing to win another Grand Slam title.

It makes him the most dangerous player in the draw.

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