For lovers of both fine tennis and fine music (this columnist's fortunate position) the answer may be obvious but for the rest of this column's teeming readership I explain that both geniuses attract powerful "What if?" and "If only?" speculations.

What if, we marvel, Kyrgios had been temperamentally capable of taking his tennis talents seriously, of meeting his patriotic obligations to Australia's national pride by focusing for whole fortnights at a time thus winning us the dozens of grand slams his brilliance surely would have won? If only he had been temperamentally saintly, like Our Ash or like Switzerland's Saint Roger, there is no telling what god-like glories he might have achieved. What a shame he is instead, as one of his defeated opponents accused last week at the Open, "an absolute knob".

Meanwhile (and yes I know this is a long-bowed comparison) Beethoven's devotees dream of what extra wonders he might have composed if only he had not been cruelly handicapped by deafness and if only, dead and decomposing at 56, he'd instead been spared for decades more of his unique composing.

Now these dreams and hankerings among Beethoven devotees have manifested themselves in the use of artificial intelligence to compose Beethoven's 10th symphony, generally called Beethoven X. Hitherto Beethoven's soaring Ninth symphony has been his last - but when you love and admire him enough you dare to dream of what his next symphony might have been.

Beethoven X is new. I only learned of its existence on Tuesday of last week by stumbling across famed music writer Norman Lebrecht's ferocious description and denunciation of it in the latest online The Critic.

Thus alerted and always ravenous for new experiences, I made a speedy foxtrot to YouTube where the 21-minute symphony, Beethoven X - the AI Project, is performed by the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn.

To half-digress for a moment it occurs to me that one's first reaction to the news that AI has been used to make a Beethoven symphony is a good test of whether or not one is a fogey.

At my age (I have been weathered by 76 winters) the resistance of fogeydom requires eternal vigilance. My inner fogey (IF) generally has a lean and hungry time of it because I am generally young at heart and open of mind.

But IF did rub his hands with anticipatory glee when he found I was going to listen to an AI-generated fake Beethoven symphony.

"Ian, you're going to hate it!" IF enthused. He knew how oldies like me can be very fixed and traditionalist in our musical loves and how we, the wrinkled, tend to find everything to do with AI alarmingly futuristic and new-fangled.

And perhaps Norman Lebrecht (he is 73) does show some fogeydom in his storming response to Beethoven X, albeit in this case informed fogeydom for what he doesn't know about classical music is not worth knowing.

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But how I wanted to thwart IF and to contradict Stormin' Norman in this! It is not only that in my contra-fogeydom I find AI and its possibilities thrilling but also that I see in this search for a Beethoven X the same admirable, adventurous, poetic, ever-questing human instinct one sees in the dreams the brightest and best have of recreating extinct creatures like the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger from remnant crumbs of DNA, from daydreaming and from stardust.

I remember too making the pilgrimage to Ainola, the Finnish home (now a shrine-museum), of my very favourite composer Jean Sibelius and of having the fantasy of eluding tour guides, climbing into a mouldering garden shed through its window and in there by a miracle finding in a cobwebbed drawer the manuscript of Sibelius' 8th symphony.

A perfectionist and not thinking it good enough, he is reported to have destroyed its manuscript by burning it in an Ainola fireplace. This has left his admirers (for whom the symphony would have been far more than just good enough) ever since yearning for what might have been. In much the same way today (here I take out the long bow again) some yearn for what Nick Kyrgios might have been if only he'd had Ash Barty's perfect personality instead of his own imperfect one.

Alas, though, and to IF's delight, having given Beethoven X every chance by listening to it several times I find it bland and clichéd. It demeans Beethoven to associate him with this 21 minutes of what blancmange would sound like if it could musically express itself.

Norman Lebrecht puts it scathingly well.

"The 2021 effort [the confecting of Beethoven X] was compiled by [lots of] data scientists, musicians and musicologists," he seethes.

"And] given that an infinity of monkeys has yet to write Shakespeare, it is no surprise that these finite minds made porridge out of Beethoven. Everything in this lumpy dish regresses. Beethoven's signature style, his urge to innovate, his need to flout precedent, to prick the pompous and kick the fools, is painfully absent."

Here I take out my long bow again to note how Nick Kyrgios' signature style, like Beethoven's as described by Lebrecht, is his urge to innovate, his need to flout precedent, to prick the pompous and kick the fools, to never allow tennis to descend into the predominantly-white, genteel, etiquette-strangled porridge that fogeys prefer tennis to be.