Having had a look at Bartons record he looks like the type of opposition you would expect at this level but unlikely to progress much beyond it, (23 futures SF last year). Then thought I would check out where he would lie in the greater scheme of things in prospects in Australian tennis. We have 56 males players registered on the ITF site who's name begins with A v Australia who have 90 ish.

My eye was then caught by one of our B's a Mr Roderick Bastard, surprised that I had only seen his name come up in Jeff Stellings posts and then not in context, I thought his career need further investigation.

Closer analysis shows just how good collegiate tennis is as a stepping board to the pro circuit. Rod has been a touring pro for more than 15 years now and at the ripe old she of 41 despite the majority of his income being as a business man in sport is still able to step out at the challenger level and win.

All this he puts down to the high quality mentoring of his tennis coach at I think the University of South Carolina!!!

R1:  Brydan Klein & Luke Saville (AUS) CR 800 (211+589) vs Hiroki Moriya & Zhang Ze (JPN/CHN) CR 1056 (684+372)

Barton is the player who in Burnie last week, got in as a LL and then went on to reach the semis, so he is clearly playing well. En route to the semis, be beat Brydan before eventually losing out to Chung (Kyle's conqueror) in 3 sets. Chung went on to win the final.

That was when James would have been early 2013 when James was ranked about 250. Difficult to workout exactly what the course of his dip is but over the last year he has been playing futures with a run of SF losses. Given last weeks performance let's hope Kyle is now rested and ready to go.

Thanks for that, difficult to work out exactly what was going on purely from his ITF activity, I wish him well with his comeback but hoping for an early stall this week!

( I do know some of the controversy from the past but he was young and seems to be doing ok now) so

well done Brydan