At one point here, you could have entered any of the Caja Magica’s three main arenas and seen a Swiss player on the charge. Not bad for a country of 8.4 million, the majority of whom favour football and ice hockey over tennis.

While Roger Federer, Stan Wawrinka and Belinda Bencic might cover a 16-year generational spectrum, they all possess perfect technique and can thread a ball through a cat flap if required. Those control freaks at the Lawn Tennis Association should note Switzerland’s laissez-faire approach, which leaves promising young prospects to make their own developmental decisions.

All three members of the cuckoo-clock club scored victories, but it was Bencic who will remember the day most warmly. For the second time this season, she overcame world No 1 Naomi Osaka, producing stinging service returns to fight back from a 5-3 deficit in the deciding set. Her reward is a semi-final on Friday against Simona Halep, the French Open champion.

Bencic’s return to relevance – she will climb to at least No 15 in the world on Monday – feels particularly heartwarming after she was subjected to one of the worst nightmares for any player: surgery on her wrist tendons. Having risen so quickly that she won a main-draw match at the Australian Open while still only 16, it seemed that she might disappear down the same plug hole as Britain’s Laura Robson – another teenage prodigy whose wrists gave up on her.