I am taking bomb & burts up in the morning to

Loughborough Very strong field could be a tough week .

Great Harry got a WC be nice if he can pick up some singles points 

In the doubles be nice to play rice & Thornley ideally in the final see where we are at!

Give it a go 

Salmon wrote:

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A1, I'm going to pose a fairly uncomfortable question, but I've been thinking about it for a while. Feel free to ignore it if you want. 


Willis is ranked inside the top 350 now and Burton is a good distance away. It's still fine, they can target the same 10Ks, where Marcus will be one of the top seeds and Lewis will get in directly. But very soon, Marcus will have to move on to Challenger qualifiers and I think it'll be ideal for Lewis's singles career that he stays back in Futures for another year, because he's not ready for Challenger qualies. But if that happens, playing doubles together will be a problem, so how are you going to tackle this issue?

 

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You're not the only one who has been wondering about this. Given that Dave and Sean appear to be facing exactly the same situation as Marcus and Lewis, there is an obvious solution that would keep all four of them in all-GB pairs, with Marcus and Dave playing Challengers and Lewis and Sean continuing with Futures for a bit longer and potentially dominating in doubles at that level.

Of course, that's easy to suggest - whether it is actually a realistic option (or even whether the players feel that there is a problem that needs to be solved in the first place) is just about impossible for an outsider to know. I have no idea how well the four of them get on or whether the swapped pairs would complement each other anywhere near as well as the existing pairs. However, if it did work out, it could be a very amicable way to find a solution that might be good for all of them in both singles and doubles.

Full doubles draw:

R1:  (1) David Rice & Sean Thornley CR 469 vs BYE
R1:  Ben Minski & Matthew Richmond UNR vs Sizya Ernest Kivanda & Kenichiro Oishi UNR
R1:  (3) Lewis Burton & Marcus Willis CR 816 vs Joris de Loore & Pirmin Hänle (BEL/GER) CR 1340
R1:  Isaac Stoute & Sam Taylor UNR vs Aaron Banasik & Sam Hutt UNR
R1:  Kevin Griekspoor & Scott Griekspoor (NED/NED) CR 1422 vs Josh Goodall & Harry Meehan CR 1535
R1:  Tom Kisiel & Sam Preston UNR vs (4) George Coupland & Marcus Daniell (NZL) CR 1012
R1:  James Marsalek & Myles Orton CR 1818 vs Tom Allen & Oliver Hudson CR 3153
R1:  Rob Carter & Jathan Malik CR 3419 vs (2) Sam Barry & Laurynas Grigelis (IRL/LTU) CR 797

@A1 - fair enough, as I said, it only looked like an obvious option to an outsider like me, I am well aware that there is usually a lot more to the choice of doubles partner than it may first appear.

Yes, they have re-jigged the singles draw - I was wondering why Tom wasn't seeded above Neil but didn't have time to check, they must have used the wrong week's rankings  - they didn't use this week's by mistake (else Marcus would have been the top seed) but I think if they used the rankings from the week before last (maybe re-using the list they used to seed Sunderland last week), that would have produced the errors in the original draw.

Anyway, making the changes:

L32: (1) Ashley Hewitt WR 376 v (Q) Jonathan Parkes UNR
(non-GB): Tucker Vorster (RSA) WR 617 (CH 616 last week) v (Q) Piotr Lomacki (POL) WR 1544 (CH 1479 in Aug)
L32: (Q) Scott Duncan WR 1786 v (WC) Harry Meehan WR 2054
(non-GB): (7) Sam Barry (IRL) WR 495 (CH 489 in Sep) v Kevin Griekspoor (NED) WR 663 (= CH)

L32: (Q) Isaac Stoute UNR v (4) Laurynas Grigelis (LTU) WR 405 (CH 183 in 2012)
L32: (WC) Sam Hutt WR 1250 v Pirmin Hänle (GER) WR 879 (CH 526 in 2009)
L32: Josh Goodall WR 520 v (WC) Imran Aswat WR 1328
(non-GB): (5) Joris de Loore (BEL) WR 418 (CH 409 in Aug) v N Vijay Sundar Prashanth (IND) WR 798 (CH 501 in Apr)

L32: (6) Tom Farquharson WR 486 v Lewis Burton WR 690 - H2H 1-3, last 3 to Lewis including 2 this year
L32: Rob Carter WR 904 v Jathan Malik WR 999 - H2H 1-0, 4 & 0, Bournemouth 2013
L32: George Coupland WR 925 v (WC) Tom Allen UNR - H2H 1-0, 3 & 5, Shrewsbury 2013
L32: (3) Marcus Willis WR 346 v Myles Orton WR 1059

L32: (8) Neil Pauffley WR 447 v (Q) Nicolas Rosenzweig (FRA) WR 1476 (CH 687 in 2012) - H2H 2-0, both last year
L32: (Q) Bruce Strachan UNR v (Q) Jamie Malik UNR
L32: James Marsalek WR 638 v Marcus Daniell (NZL) WR 586 (CH 569 in Jul) - H2H 0-1, 3 & 2, Israel 2012
L32: (2) Dave Rice WR 380 v (Q) Clay Crawford UNR - H2H 1-0, 2 & 4, Cardiff 2012