A - 0?

B - Not sure. It would be nice to have futures winners, but I'd rather see a brit knocked out in a challenger qf than win a futures event (unless it's a player on the way up).

C - I would dearly love to see better publicity for futures. As it stands, no-one among Joe Public knows when a player wins unless it's an ATP/WTA tour event or upwards. As far as a player's career goes, few people care about how many futures a player has won - it's just 12 more ranking points. I don't suppose this would make any difference to the number of british winners (in fact, it might have the opposite effect by bringing higher-ranked players down a level to have a higher chance of winning) but at least make it more worthwhile being a pro tennis player if you aren't good enough to break the top 200.

Oh and Jamie Baer won one.

Baker won GBR F6 then Bloomfield won GBR F7 way back in March. Thats 5 months without a GBR winner in singles...indicative of the current crop maybe ? Im sure if Morgan had stayed fit he would be top 300 by now with a few wins but there you go !!!

I suppose we should give the new LTA scheme / Roehampton / Gilbert / Lundgren etc a chance....

Oh and we could also give some of Andy's DNA to Prof Ian Wilmut......

Here's the Challenger winners...

	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	Total
Alex Bogdanovic		1	2	3	1	7
Andy Murray			2			2
Arvind Parmar	1	1				2
Total	1	2	4	3	1	11

And the ATP winners...

	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	Total
Greg Rusedski	2	1	1	1			5
Tim Henman	1	2					3
Andy Murray					1	1	2
Total	3	3	1	1	1	1	10

-- Edited by Akhenaten at 09:40, 2007-08-08

2007 - 1 Jamie Murray!

but you dont necessarily need to win lots of futures to push up to the next lvl, boggo only won the one.

Part of the reason is that the group of players who were going deep in futures last year (Bloomers, Baker, Marray and Mackin in particular) have either stepped up to challengers more consistently or retired in mackin's case. I don't think that's something to worry about too much.

Then, as has been said Morgan Phillips is injured at the moment and I think if he'd been playing he'd be going deep regularly if not winning all the time (presumably if he'd won all the futures he'd have gone straight to challengers as well).

And then theres the natural eb and flow of things like this, no country ever has a fixed number of players doing well/playing in general. Look at America they are going through a dearth as well as us, Australia too though they have a few players up-and-coming. France is just coming out (at ATP level at least) of a dearth period and are starting to have new prospects coming through. Russia is changing up a bit too. It's something that happens. Yes its disappointing for us that we're in a period of having few 'winners' but I think we have to say it's going to happen and concentrate on the long term solutions, which it seems to me the lta are doing. We have seemingly hundreds of exciting potential in the juniors and it's important that that potential is tapped into. Whilst I would never advocate deserting the current futures set I think we do have to face up to the fact that they aren't winning and aren't really showing signs that they will. So maybe this will be the worst year for futures wins in goodness knows how long, and maybe next year will be just as bad but after that we have every reason to hope and expect a revival. If things continue to be bad then, that's when we should start to worry i reckon.