Yeah..........I said "nine"

Edit....what edit

Shhh wrote:

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Seeing Jamie Murray sneak back quietly into the top 100 this week, we now have;

MS: Andy Murray
MD: Ross Hutchings, Colin Fleming, Ken Skupski, Jamie Murray
WS: Anne Keothavong, Elena Baltacha, Katie O'Brien
WD: Sarah Borwell

Nine in total, is this a record in the modern era or just the best for the last 10 years or so?

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This is a tough question to answer given that I didn't keep any historical data on doubles but the highest number of men and women we've had in the singles top 100 since 1980 was 7 in 1981 and 1985.

In 1985, we had 4 men in the doubles top 100 too and while it seems to be impossible to find WTA doubles rankings going that far back, Jo Durie and Anne Hobbs reached the AO doubles semis that year, so they must have ended it ranked in the top 100.

So there were at least 11 Brits in the top 100 at the end of 1985:

John Lloyd MS 42
Jeremy Bates MS 99

John Lloyd MD 67
Colin Dowdeswell MD 69
Jeremy Bates MD 94
David Felgate MD 96

Annabel Croft WS 24
Jo Durie WS c. 31
Anne Hobbs WS
Sara Gomer WS
Virginia Wade WS

Jo Durie WD
Anne Hobbs WD
+ other WD too?

Of course, there were some Brits in both the singles and doubles top 100s back then, so  we may have had less than 9 different players in top 100s that year.

We haven't had more than 3 singles players (men and women combined) in the top 100 at a year-end since 1998 since (Tim, Greg & Sam Smith) and at that stage only Neil Broad was in the doubles top 100 - again, I can't find any women's doubles rankings from back then.

johnnylad wrote:

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Excellent work Sah!

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Yes, although it did take him a fair while to come back with the answers, perhaps he's getting slow in his old age?

I see the LTA have been reading here again...

"This weekends results mean that the number of British players with top 100 rankings has more than doubled from four to nine in the past week, Baltacha, OBrien, Fleming , Skupski and Jamie Murray (this week ranked No.97 in doubles) joining world No.77 Anne Keothavong, world No.3 Andy Murray and doubles specialists No.79 Sarah Borwell and No.43 Ross Hutchins in the games elite."

They go onto report the various beaten semi finalists and finalists but omit Baker boys win down under

Yes, I suspect that the LTA did work that out themselves  

And it's great for them to have such good news to report, even if its slightly coincidental that all 5 joined the top 100 in the same week.

Congratulations are very much due to the 4 newbies and hopefully they and Jamie on his reintroduction can push ever on.

What I would be interested in is :  Have the LTA got any future targets for top 100 placers ?  ( maybe they have announced some, don't know if anyone knows this ? )

But quite apart from the USA and Russia at nearly 40 ( 39 and 38 respectively ), Spain, Germany, France and the Czech Republic have more than 20 ( 29, 27, 24 and 24 respectively ).   Lucky the Czechs are not still adding Slovakia

I'd say a perferctly resaonable long term 10 year target is that by then GB too would have 20 top 100 entries.

Then we would really know if all the good words, good intentions and indeed some of the practical things put in place had really worked.

Thanks, Steven.

12 by 2012 sounds a perfectively reasonable and realistic target.

How about extend that to : "12 by 12, 20 by 20 !"   That won't take Archimedes either to see how much on target we are by each passing year  

I do though agree with you about the equivalence of singles and doubles and nearly did put in my 10 year target "with a minuimum of x singles players"

Mmm  8 or 10 ?   Oh, let's go for it.   How about by  :  20 with a minimium of 10 singles players ?

I wouldn't want Steven's or my comments to be any downer on the doubles achievements ( and hopefully future achievements ) which are a great reflection on the players themselves.  You only need to look back to the recent Davis Cup also to see the importance of doubles to any nation.

We surely must though have singles targets, and thanks Steven for reinforcing the passing thoughts that I had.  In my view, we are not going to add another singles top 100 player any time soon, but we really should have longer term targets here and it would be nice to know what these are.