Every year at Queen's, I go to the bookshop and pick up a tennis book. Last year it was Neil Harman's book about Tigger and Greg, "Duel for the Crown", which was a good read. I did later find out that some of the stuff about Greg's early career was highly inaccurate, but that could well be Neil interviewing Greg and Greg misremembering, as I have often noticed him do!
 
This year, I picked up Alan Mills's autobiography for £5 (it was that or Muzza's autobiog ... hmm guess how long I mulled over that decision! - less time than it takes to say the word "decision"!) and I have been enjoying reading it since.

As you'd expect, it's certainly not a blockbuster, but there's a fair bit of humour, some excellent insights into the referee's job (which largely match my experiences of 'controlling the controllers' on a much smaller scale for something else I am involved in, which is one of the reasons why I thought his book might be interesting) and a lot of good sense, making it well worth a read.

Towards the end, he says the the second most frequent question he is asked (after "the jokers who stop me in the street and ask if it's going to rain today") is "What on earth is wrong with British tennis?" to which he replies "How long have you got?"

He takes six pages to answer it, so I won't copy the whole lot out, not least because I have plenty of comments I want to add too.

The thrust of much of it is 'catch them young', make tennis more accessible and concentrate on the kids who are less likely to find going to university and into a career in the professions more attractive than tennis when they turn 18.

He says (N.B. this was written in 2005) that "it is fair to say that in recent years, Britain has managed to produce a handful of very talented youngsters ... three of our juniors, Hannah Grady (where's she now?), Claire Peterzan (where's she now?) and Katie O'Brien, have recently improved their ranking by 500 places on the WTA list. However, our experience over the past 30 years ago seems to suggest that this young talent will not push through at senior level."

He thinks that one of the reasons for this is "that there are nowhere near enough tournaments of sufficient quality being played here - it is only in the furnace of real competition that good players can be forged."

"In Spain," he says, "one of the world leaders in tennis these days, they have hundreds of tournaments all year round, which gives their youngsters a great advantage over others." (note that Spain is on Future F24 this week, in week 25, and that's ignoring the Challengers ...)

He goes on to say that: "It is also a dreadful irony that the major international tournaments staged by Britain are so well run" (and from what I've heard, they are fro ma player's point of view, even if not from a fan's point of view) "that many foreign players come back again and again, tus making it more difficult for home-grown talent to gain some experience and exposure while picking up some important ranking points along the way."

How true this is! If you look at the Argentine Future this week, all but two of the DAs on the original entry list were from Argentina (so almost all the points from that Future will get shared out between Argentina players), in the Brazilian Future this week, the top 6 (ranked 483 to 891) were from Brazil, followed by yet more Argentines. Even in Venezuela, nearly half of the DAs were from Venezuela!

I'm not saying we should aim to have mainly GB players at all our Futures (quite the opposite), but when you think that there's no difference in the points given out and there's a huge bias towards clay court events in terms of the number that are held, you can see why Argentina has a huge base of over-ranked players in the 300-1000 range who are getting far more opportunities to pick up points than the Brits (or indeed many of the Western Europeans) ever do.

If the Challengers in South America are at all similar, it's hardly surprising that the lower reaches of the top 100 are full of them, and many of them are complete numpties on anything but clay.

Mills then goes on to say that "On the plus side, however, the LTA does seem to have realised this and, taking a leaf out of the Spanish book, has started to organise more events, starting in 2004 and going forward. ... These steps are critical if Britain is once again to become a serious contender in world tennis."

Without wanting to put words into his mouth, I imagine that he must be as scandalised as we are at the drastic cut in the number of Challengers and Futures being held over here this year.

He also mentions that "One of the most damning and depressing developments recently has been the downgrading of a project to open up a string of eight regional acadeies around the country. ... Not long after the system was set up, the LTA suddenly announced that they were shutting four of them because they had not attracted enough players to fill them. ... I felt like screaming "Well, why don't you go out and find them? Wasn't that part of the enterprise?"

It seems so typical for the cause of any given problem to be wrongly identified like this, leading to the wrong solution being adopted, though in fairness, I guess the new talent id initiative is an attempt to improve the thing Mills most found wrong about this.

He seems to support the idea of the NTC and thought at the time that there were some encouraging signs (though some of the things he mentions seem to have reversed again in the last couple of years) - interestingly, his two tips at the time (very early 2005, I think) were "Andrew Murray" and Miles Kasiri - well, one of those turned out right!

He does bemoan the lack of killer instinct among the Brits (as I think we all do), compared to, say, the Russians (this was pre-Serbian days!) but he does seem to recognise that many of them work hard.

Anyway, I just thought some of that might interest you ...