Clearly Muzza did a great job in his own rubbers in this tie  and he's a brilliant player nowadays, but to slag off the rest of the team to the press afterwards was unnecessary, classless and almost certainly counter-productive.  I imagine he felt entitled to do so in return for being publicly criticised over the Argentina tie, but he should have been able to rise above doing it in public.

It seems to have been forgotten in all this that Boggo won a set in each match  the first time he's done that in DC, and didn't seem (to me) to just give up when the going got tough, something he has appeared to be guilty of at times in the past.

Looking at this tie in isolation, going a set and a break up against Smelly was quite an achievement (particularly the way he did it) and the Peya match was always going to be a 50:50 match, so if Alex had never had to be thrown to the wolves in the past and this had been his first DC tie, I think we'd have been saying, "pity he couldn't convert the lead against Peya, but that was a pretty good effort for someone ranked outside the top 150."

Indeed, I think Peya (who played above himself in the end) might have folded had Boggo not been a bit injured and been able to come into the net from time to time to make things a bit more unpredictable ... and most of all, had Boggo's reputation for choking not gone before him.

It seems that even if Alex doesn't actually choke, the knowledge that he might is enough to make the opponent keep fighting ... and of course if you notice all your opponent's team mates slinking off to the dressing room halfway through the match (never mind the stuff Murray spouted about it not mattering because Boggo never looks to the bench for support anyway - even if Boggo didn't notice, I bet the Austrians did!) and little Louis Cayer being the only person on the home bench managing to keep any enthusiasm going at all, that must give you quite a lift if you're Peya.

I'm not arguing that Boggo should be kept in the DC team - he clearly gets very little out of the atmosphere created by the large crowd, so he's never likely to raise his game like some Challenger-level players do when they play DC and I'm not even sure any more whether it would have had that much of a positive effect on him if he had won yesterday. Then again, would you relish playing in front of a large crowd when you've been slagged off unfairly (the extent of it, at least, is unfair) by so many people for years on end?

It's not Boggo's 'fault' that:
 
- he is GB's second best singles player by some margin
- he has won more Challenger titles this century than all the other Brits put together
- there haven't been enough Brits coming up to stop him getting Wimby WCs
- no other Challenger level Brit has won a match that has lasted more than three sets for years. (*)

Nor is it his 'fault' that he has put himself out to play DC ties in both Australia and Argentina in recent years and played a couple of times when he was injured without making a big thing of it like most other players would have.

(*)That's not to downplay Eaton beating Patience and Pashanski in straights or Bloomers thrashing Berlocq, all of which were fine achievements, but I think Boggo might have been able to keep at least two of those players under the cosh for three straight sets too.

What I think Alex should do now, for his own sake, is to forget DC for a while and concentrate on getting into the top 100. He's going to have to beat some demons to do that, so maybe when he has done that, he'll be ready to play DC again.

Actually, I think Boggo's performances were a heck of a lot better than the abject display by our doubles pairing, Shaggy in particular - not a view that went down well in the AM.com area, I have to say.  No, they didn't lose from a set up, but that's only because they never looked likely to win a set in the first place!  I'm not saying this to be nasty to the doubles team, just to make it clear why I think it's unfair that Boggo seems to be getting singled out to be the scapegoat for a DC loss yet again.

In fairness to the AM.commers (in spite of their collective groan when I said near the end of the doubles match "Looks like Boggo's going to have to be the hero then!"), they made a lot of noise during the match and sustained it long after their idol had bu**ered off to the dressing room, only really going quiet when Alex went 0-4 down in the 4th (which I have to admit silenced me too) but still managing to raise some enthusiasm again when he got one of those breaks back.

-- Edited by steven at 22:44, 2008-09-22