A Tale Of Woe For Britain

As qualifying for Wimbledon continued today the final Brits standing exited at the Second Round stage. Chris Eaton and Kyle Edmund lost and joined first round casualties Liam Broady, Richard Bloomfield, David Rice, Edward Corrie, George Morgan, Luke Bambridge and Andrew Fitzpatrick. Not 100% sure how many British men will now be lining up at Wimbledon in the singles next week. A glum picture of the state of British tennis though.

Extremely glum for the British Men’s game but has been for years with the exception of the few brave souls that avoided the LTA structure and actually made it. I have always thought that the LTA must be the most inept national sporting body
I do realise that amount of money spent on a sport isn’t the only way of assuring success but the LTA gets an absolute fortune each and every year from Wimbledon and cannot produce any men players capable of staying in the top 100. The last British players to do so were: Henman, who was born with a grass court in his back yard and was told bt the LTA that he might make a living out of doubles, Rusedski who is Canadian and then Murray whose mother had the good sense to take him out of the LTA p[programme; got a feeling Martin Lee was the last true ‘LTA player’ to enter the top 100

Kyle Edmund was a bright spark with a very impressive first round win. The crop of 17/18 year olds are as good a collection as has been seen in a number of years. They are a bit young to step up to the mark yet but hopefully they will come through to be top 100 players.

Roger Draper has to go and should have gone a long time ago when it was found that his rhetoric was orders of magnitude away from the reality.

Lisa Whybourn I believe to be a good prospect - she injured herself last year over exerting herself. She made it to the second round of qualifying picking up a handy 40 ranking points.

Brian Baker (US) has made it to the last round of qualifying...
Not sure what happened to Kyle Edmund but he put up a fight, losing 6-0 6-7 2-6 in the second round.

But is the lack of succesful British players the fault of the LTA or of the players themselves? Maybe it's a gross generalisation but in my country UK is portraited as a country of binch-drinking youths with little goals for the future. Young players will find it hard to succeed with that attitude.

Chydremion wrote: Maybe it's a gross generalisation but in my country UK is portraited as a country of binch-drinking youths with little goals for the future

Maybe? Maybe? there is no 'maybe' in it, that is a gross generalisation and frankly, quite rude. I would have objected whatever country you were referring to

Lisa Whybourn lost in three sets in the qualifiers.

Hence:
Number of Brits in men and womens qualifiers = SEVENTEEN

Number winning through to second round = THREE

Number winning through to third round = ZERO

Number qualifying = ZERO

Number of British players who played against somebody with a worse ranking than themselves = zero.

That's the nature of home wildcards in any event.

The players who would be winning qualification rounds are given MDWCs - and they'll be castigated for not beating people 100+ spots in front of them in the rankings.

Thing with British tennis players is, they have put no emphasis on where to place the return ball, they just hit it safely back in court, and are left trying to run wildly to chase the ball. British players that actually try and get on the front foot in rallies never seem to get the funding, they give the funding to the safe players, who may have better legs for running but no real skill.

Same problems in many types of sport in Britain.

Interesting, yet completely unfounded and baseless opinion there.

Facts are not my forte though I do love bathing with seals.

Josiah Maiestas wrote:Thing with British tennis players is, they have put no emphasis on where to place the return ball, they just hit it safely back in court, and are left trying to run wildly to chase the ball. British players that actually try and get on the front foot in rallies never seem to get the funding, they give the funding to the safe players, who may have better legs for running but no real skill.

Same problems in many types of sport in Britain.

Not sure about that. They seem to give funding to those players who are from rich upper class backgrounds. Any decent youngster who isn't from an upper class family has no chance of getting interest from the LTA.

The funding pathway that the LTA produce is pretty clear and is 100% dependent on results and rankings.

If you achieve X results and are Y years old you get Z funding.

There's nothing that states that you're not entitled to the funding if you're family isn't 'upper class'.

Does Andy Murray come from an 'upper class family'?

Youve hit the centre of the problem there dj, Murray was taking away from the LTA by Judy because they were not being helpful enough. Not so smart now eh?

Gboycottnut says that you only get funded if you're from an 'upper class family'.

Andy Murray was funded. Andy Murray doesn't not come from an 'upper class family'. This was my one and only point.

Whether the funding and support was helpful or not is completely irrelevant to the point I was making, as I didn't make any judgement about the effectiveness of the actual funding system.

Still as smart as ever sadly.

Does James Ward come from an 'upper class family'?