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Some sound and very true words from the "maestro" - here are a few paragraphs, and at the end is a link to see the whole article.
"There’s been some harsh criticism of the people who run tennis in Britain in the wake of Britain’s defeat in the Davis Cup to Lithuania but to pick one or two people and start calling for them to be removed isn’t a cure-all solution. The blame game won’t work because British tennis has shortcomings with deep cultural and historical roots. There’s even an argument that Britain is not a “tennis nation”. Sure, you stage the most prestigious event in the world – Wimbledon. But your national sports are soccer and cricket, and your Olympic resources go to cycling, rowing, sailing, swimming, all sports at which you excel at or are improving in. Tennis is part of a social scene. So to argue that Roger Draper, the chief executive of the LTA, is responsible for British tennis’s ills is to misidentify the problem. If you’d had generations of Grand Slam winners (like the Australian men from the mid 1940s to the early 1970s, or us Americans for many decades) and then they’d disappeared, then seek blame. But those generations of British tennis winners never existed, not this side of the black-and-white movie era. Those players who have flown the flag for Britain in recent times have been largely family-produced (Henman, Murray) or from elsewhere (Rusedski). So you can’t say that there is a system that’s broken down because there never was an effective system. The USA has seven top-100 men, and 31 inside the top 500. Britain, at about a sixth the population of the US, should have about one man in the top 100 and five inside the top 500 if it wants to aspire to America’s standards. In fact it does have one, and 11 inside the top 500. Does that make British tennis better than American tennis? No, but neither is one (more) Davis Cup defeat a fresh crisis from nowhere. It’s just another prompt to look again at what you can do to get better. To read the full article , click the tenniszoo link. |
