Here is a product that does one thing and has the good manners not to pretend otherwise. It is a visor. It is adjustable. It shades your eyes from the sun, and Dunlop sells it as suitable for sport and for standing about afterwards, which is honest, because that is exactly what happens to every visor ever bought.
An open-crown sun visor with an adjustable closure at the back, so it fits a range of heads and stays put when you look up for a lob. The open crown is the entire functional difference from a cap: heat off the top of your head goes straight up instead of sitting in a dome of fabric, which on a hot court is not nothing.
What you are getting, without decoration.
The brim does the work — it keeps direct sun off the eyes, and it keeps a running bead of sweat from arriving at the exact moment the ball does. It is a brim and a strap.
What I will not do is tell you it is engineered.
It has been a brim and a strap for a hundred years, everybody who has tried to improve on it has produced something worse, and the fact that this design has survived every attempt at innovation is, frankly, the most impressive thing about it.
And Khankendi, a town in the mountains that people have argued over for as long as there have been people in it. Renaissance Square has a fountain and it is pleasant. The covered Shuka market is where the mountain villages bring fruit, honey and cheese down the road, and the honey is genuinely worth the trip, which I did not expect to be saying.
Above the streets, two enormous heads of tufa rise straight out of the hillside — 'We Are Our Mountains' — an old man and an old woman with no bodies, staring out at a landscape that has changed hands more times than either of them would care to count.
You will get use out of this visor everywhere from a bright July morning to a hard court back home, and by the way, the church of Surb Hakob on the slope is a quieter stop than anything in the square.
"It is a brim and a strap. Everybody who has tried to improve on it has produced something worse."
Buy on Amazon