Eaton: Be more patient with British tennis

MRUK · Improver

Eaton: Be more patient with British tennis

Count Zero · Tennis legend

an interesting read, whilst Eaton is perhaps wrong about the age thing, he does have a point all of our promising players get immediately liked to a great player: Boggo as the next Henman for example, from about the age of 17 or so. and now its going to be Evans as the next Murray etc etc. then when the players more often that not fail to live up to what is basically unrealistic expectations they get slaughtered. which in turn knocks their confidence.

steven · Tennis legend

Yes, nice interview and he was giving good interviews at DC too. It seems a bit unfair to debunk his claim about most players not breaking into the top 100 at age 20 by looking at when the current top 100 were 22 (especially since he seemed to be talking about those without 'real, brilliant talent), but it's an interesting and revealing bit of research nonetheless.

Clearly most of the eventual top 20 players will have broken through before the age of 21, but you can make a good living from tennis anywhere in the top 100, and I'm sure most of the Brits in the 100-500 range would be more than happy to reach the top 100 even if they never make it to the top 50. I would guess that a much higher proportion of the players in that category made it top the top 100 in the 20-25 age range with the odd one or two not making it until even later.

In the end, it's unfair to get at any one particular Brit over our lack of top 100 players when it's the lack of strength in depth that's the big problem. If we had a similar strength in depth to the French (Robert wasn't even in their top 25 the last time I looked) or the Spanish, our players in the 100-350 range would be though of as decent Challenger level players and someone like Josh would be thought of as doing well to fulfil his own (limited?) potential and left to get on with it, not getting some of the blame for the fact that we don't have anyone other than Muzza in the top 150.

The Knight · Challenger qualifying

good interview from Chris, it's nice to hear that he's trying to fix his problem of only being able to perform on the big occasions.

While his claim of most players not making the t100 until they were older was debunked, it should be mentioned that players with his style of play don't really perform until they are a bit older eg Karlovic, Stepanek

Aeneas · Lower Club Player

Just to back up what Steven's already said, here's what I've just posted on MTF:

Right I hope this all works and don't be surprised if I've made minor mistakes! I've just done my own research of the current top 100 to find the average age that the players first entered it as I wasn't convinced by the argument that Eaton says 'most people enter it after 20' and MRUK decides to add 2 years to the figure to prove him wrong.

Conclusions
The average age a member of the top 10 entered the top 100 for the first time is 18.5 with only Simon entering it after his 21st birthday
Those currently ranked between 11-50 entered the top 100 for the first time at the average age of 20.125, with 25 out of the 40 players entering before they turned 21.
However, only 17 out of the remaining 50 players in the top 100 (those ranked beteeen 51-100) got higher than #100 before age 21 and of those 17, 15 of them are still currently under the age of 22 (therefore not likely to have peaked yet) or have a career high in the top #16. (Martin and Lu being the exceptions).

It is the players ranked between 51-100 that reach the top 100 in general later than aged 20 which give Eaton's argument its weight rather than MRUK's counter-argument.
The conclusions give a rather different slant: as long as Eaton or whoever's goal is to get inside the top 100 rather than aspire to become world-beaters inside the top 10 then the ambition is realistic even if they haven't achieved it by the time they're 21. (obviously this is down to the individual of course and with Eaton's potential top 100 seems a stretch!)

Anyway, thought this was a better way to spend my afternoon than working on my dissertation.

I can't find a way to attach the document with the stats on so this will have to do...
http://www.menstennisforums.com/showthread.php?t=140865

-- Edited by Aeneas on Monday 30th of March 2009 05:41:29 PM

steven · Tennis legend

Thanks, that's really good stuff. I assume you mean 17 out of the remaining 50 (not 33), and 33 is the number of players in the 51-100 range who reached the top 100 for the first time when they were 21 or older.

It's amazing that Gicquel didn't enter the top 100 until he was 29, and he then made the top 50. When he was 23, he was still outside the top 1000 and here are his rankings at the year-ends when he was aged:

24 - 406 (Boggo's age)
25 - 225 (Bloomers' age)
26 - 411 (must have been an injury in there, I assume)
27 - 163 (Bam-Bam's age)
28 - 123 (Jonny's age)
29 - 50

-- Edited by steven on Monday 30th of March 2009 05:46:04 PM

Aeneas · Lower Club Player

steven wrote:

Thanks, that's really good stuff. I assume you mean 17 out of the remaining 50 (not 33), and 33 is the number of players in the 51-100 range who reached the top 100 for the first time when they were 21 or older.

Yes, sorry. Well spotted.

Vandenburg · Futures level

Aeneas wrote:

steven wrote:

Thanks, that's really good stuff. I assume you mean 17 out of the remaining 50 (not 33), and 33 is the number of players in the 51-100 range who reached the top 100 for the first time when they were 21 or older.

Yeh great stats thanks for that,
as for disseratation, ive been there in final year before! it means no wimby and french open for you to watch!!
Yes, sorry. Well spotted.