Dunne now into 3rd set Tie break. And Josh has to leave

steven wrote:

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Harriet on Twitter:

"Won 46 62 76(9). Saved 5 match points! Fought really hard. Main draw tomorrow. #herewego"

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Peter too wrote:

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I'm not keen on the new ITF website. Recognising which nation is represented by one of a 100+ minute flags is not easy. If I click on one player's name on the draw, to check their ranking and nation, and then hit return it doesn't return me to the draw but instead returns me to the ITF main site. I then have to work my way through several links to get back to the draw page. It looks like a case of over-design, placing appearance ahead of function.

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Yes, those are three of the most frustrating things. Changes often seem to make things harder at first (because you're not used to them) only for the positive aspects to become obvious later, but in this case all the new things I keep discovering are new problems!

A couple of other annoyances I've noticed since I first complained (I'll put them here to remind me to write to them again later this week with these things plus the ones you just mentioned) are:

- clicking on a tournament name in the H2H virtually always produces an error (hopefully that is a temporary thing)
- they've messed up the chronology (for streaks, etc) by
  - lumping together all DC & Fed Cup matches for a single year in a player's activity record instead of showing each tie separately in the correct order
  - sorting the H2H only by year (no longer by full date) as they used to - for one match recently,  I was just about to write that X and Y (can't remember who they were - 2 Brits I think .. or maybe Keothavong & Barthel) were 2-1 in 2011 but Y had won their last meeting only to remember that the last match shown was actually their middle one and the 2011 matches were in a random order

That's not to say there haven't been any improvements, but they are massively outweighed (at least for the 'serious' user) by the apparently pointless downgrades.

It's really sad because the ITF site was the best and easiest-to-use tennis resource around and it doesn't even need to look 'pretty' because those who use it are either players (who need to use it) or real tennis enthusiasts, both of whom are likely to value functionality over look - casual fans who might be impressed by a new look are only interested in the main tour.

Peter too wrote:

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The ITF site does include the player's nationality on the acceptance list which should include all but late entries. So I could get the nationalities by having two ITF pages open at the same time, one for the ties and one for the nationalities. The inability to return to the previous page now makes it faster to write down the ties and then switch to the WTA site for the rankings rather than clicking the player's name.

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They didn't include nationality on the acceptance list initially (just flags), but did after I wrote and asked (I doubt I was the only one), but the main point is, how can they think all this is an improvement when you have to open more pages than you used to ... and it takes some doing to make the (never very user-friendly) ATP & WTA sites easier-to-use than the ITF one for some things!

The other thing I couldn't believe was the way they have copied one of the worst things about the last major change to the ATP site - the thing whereby to get a H2H, you have to type part of a surname and wait for it to fill in possible players, which sometimes takes ages. Worse - if a surname is really common and the first name is late in the alphabet, you sometimes can't even access the player at all.

Er, I'll stop ranting now. (at least for today LOL)