Looks like I missed all the fun!

Not sure we want to be heaping all the opprobrium on Neil, given that, he's by far the best tennis journo in the country and I like the fact that he's not afraid to be a bit controversial, even when I don't agree with him, which means quite often.

However, I do think the general 'let's use Boggo as the all-purpose whipping boy for the ills of GB Tennis' attitude in the media is very unfair and, more importantly, counterproductive. Most of all, how someone who realises that tennis is played for more than one month each year can put Boggo at the top of the losers' list and Eaton near the top of the winners' list is beyond me.

Boggo has moved up this year - not very much and not nearly as much as we would have liked him to, but he has, and he has made himself available for DC twice, despite knowing that he was bound to be the scapegoat if we lost.

Against Austria, he put up a very good performance against Melzer (who had pushed Muzza very close at the US Open just a few weeks earlier) and I'm confident that he would have finished off Peya had he not been injured. As with the previous time he lost a DC rubber because he was injured, he paid for his willingness to stand up and be counted afterwards when he had to go for ranking points in tournaments while still not fully fit.

The media have still not acknowledged that he was injured, almost as if they don't believe he actually was. That would be a bit rough given that whatever other weaknesses he may have, hiding behind excuses has never seemed to be one of them.

I hope for his sake he's not in the DC squad next year and gets a free run at the top 150 or even the top 100. If he managed to reach the top 100, he would have had to banish some of the demons that have affected him in DC in the past, and I think he'd then feel under less pressure in DC too. Of course, he'd probably get a winnable rubber against the Ukraine, but there you go ...

What I would like to see him do is improve his fitness and resistance to injury (an area where other Brits do seem to have made some progress this year, unless they've just got lucky!) and improve his scheduling so that he doesn't burn out again - missing DC would no doubt help with that too.

Chris, on the other hand, did fabulously to come through Wimby qualifying (I imagine nobody would dispute that) and it takes huge character for a GB qualifier or WC to win a main draw match at Wimby whoever they are drawn against.

However, quite apart from the fact that his main draw win was against possibly the biggest grass court clown in the draw, whom I'd have fancied any of the Brits to beat had they drawn him instead (even the bookies had Chris as clear favourite to win before the match, for goodness sake!) and he won less games against Tursunov than Boggo did against Rafa two years earlier, how can he be classed as one of the big winners of the year when he doesn't seem to have taken advantage of any of the opportunities (e.g. being seeded for Futures) that his Wimby run has given him since then?

The sad fact is that Chris didn't win back to back matches again until November, and still hasn't won three in a row again since and if you exclude Wimby, he's only finished with three more ranking points than he did last year, 31 v 28.
 
Even with the excellent Wimby qualifying run (which only came after he had lost to Jonny Marray, if I remember right, in the QWC playoffs and ogt a LL-type place), had he played someone better than Pashanski and not got the extra 35 points, he wouldn't be in the top 500 even now.

The great thing about Chris is that he does give the impression that he reacts better to being on a big stage than many of the other Brits seem to, which means his forays into ATP qualifying were probably a good idea, even though they might have held down his points.

The problem with all the hype though is that he's not going to get to play regularly at that level until he starts racking up the points in Challengers and Futures, and if he can't do that before his Wimby points come off next July, it's hard to see when he's ever going to manage it. Ian Flanagan mk 2? I hope not, and I do think he's more likely to eventually go onto real success than Flan, but for the moment, the jury's still out.

-- Edited by steven at 21:56, 2008-12-21

i do love stevens novels