I do think he got a bum draw however.

I think he would have done much better against Muller, Navarro, Mayer, Vliegen, Schwank, Hernandez, Pavel, Dimitrov, Andujar, even G-G-L who he trained with in Spain.

NO MORE WILD CARDS!!!!!
we might as well give wc to 16 17 juniors.
as much as i am goin to prasie the efforts this year by ward etc, they are simply not good enough to play on the main tour.

have we moved forward? despite some bad results today, or at queens in general, of the 8 players in the md how many of them have ranking higher this time this year than last year?

murray 3 - 12
boggo 189 - 242
Goodall 199 - 374
ward 220 - 488
evans 308 - 978
Eaton 324 - 644
slabba 389 - 334
Cox 629 - 941

so only slabba has gone backwards. in rankings terms. it was a bad show by ward, but he's halved his ranking in a year. if he does that again (unlikely i know) he would be on the brink of top 100.

Well i'm really disappointed with the grass court effort so far.
When you also take into account the Nottingham tournement then there really is very little to get excited about. The most disappointing thing for me is that none of our younger players have made an impact so far. I really thought that Evans, Cox or even Willis or Smeathurst might make some kind of impact in these tournements.
We didn't even get any first round qualifier wins. That is atrocious.
People used to knock Palmer, Lee, Cowan etc but at least they would pull off the odd win here and there on the grass court season.

But hey nevermind, at least the womens game is in the strongest situation since I can remember

I agree, but I don't think it is really the point. It is probably a good thing that our players now play less on grass than they used to, as no other country has grass tournements (except Halle and Newport). Like it or not it is probably better that our players now grow up most comfortable on hard and clay courts. BUT Queens, Eastbourne, and Wimbledon are our only home tournements and should really lift our moderately ranked players to perform at a high standard like it used to.
I do follow the progress of our lower players on this board all year round, but this is really the only time we get to see them on T.V, so when all players except Murray our out by 4pm on Monday (when i'm working) it really is disappointing.

I don't know what the answer is, I mean when we used to award 7 or 8 WC to both men and women for Wimbledon we seemed to get more wins than we do now with just 3 or 4 getting in. But I also dont like the long standing culture of mediocracy that Draper is trying to get rid of. So there is clearly no easy answer. But long term we must get kids playing in parks and at clubs and lose the snottiness that seems to appear when ordinary kids pick up a racket. Coming from a comprehensive school I know that lots of kids like playing tennis, but are not pushed to go any further.

Rant over

-- Edited by thegingerlightbulb on Tuesday 9th of June 2009 09:01:11 AM

Count Zero wrote:

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do we have much advantage on grass any more? do our younger players train on the surface?

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Even if we do, that advantage is wiped out when the matches end up getting played indoors!

Some progress has clearly been made this year - 37 GB men have moved up or joined the rankings since the end of 2008 as against 22 moving down or leaving the rankings (http://www.britishtennis.net/stats/mv-m.htm?n=1) and no less than 21 GB men are at career highs at the moment - http://www.britishtennis.net/stats/ag-m.htm?n=1

Of course those moving up include players like Fleming and Phillips who have come back in the last 12 months so started off the year ranked artificially low and since Brits tend to do better in the second half of the year, quite a few are benefiting from still having a lot of doubled Challenger and Futures points from last year (at the moment, just keeping the same number of ranking points is enough to get regular career highs) so could drop a fair bit in the second half of the year even if they match what they did in tournaments in the second half of last year, but even if you allow for all that, there are more ups then downs.

What makes things still seem bad is that we still don't have anyone  doing consistently well in Challengers (though we have had two first-time Challenger winners this year, which is encouraging) or making any impression at ATP level.

While I thought that Josh and Wardy didn't have bad draws at Queen's (though Baggy played quite a lot better than I expected), they didn't have the best possible draws either - those would have been players like Navarro, Schwank, Hernandez, Andujar, Dimitrov, etc.

A home WC in any tournament anywhere in the world (i.e. not just GB players in the UK) is likely to need a draw like that to have a realistic chance of winning a match, so the best way of getting a home WC through to R2 is to give as many as possible to players with a realistic chance of beating someone like that if they were lucky enough to draw them.

In fairness to the LTA, in his article today at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/tennis/article6458964.ece, OEM suggests that the LTA actually wanted all 5 WCs to be given to Brits but were denied by the organisers:

"The clatter of home hopes on the first day at the Queen's Club, West London, will have struck a discordant note with the LTA, the tournament's proprietors. The governing body was steaming that not more than two of the five wild cards were handed to its players, clearly believing that it merited a more significant return for the £4 million investment it is said to have made into the event"

... so maybe rumours that the LTA were going to have greater control over the tournament this year were overdone and they have actually realised that the only way to get anywhere is to keep giving players the chance to test themselves at ATP level.

One of the wildcards was wasted -
Grosjean retired at 2-6 1-2

Didnt he retire against Andy last year as well?