From the Times Online:

The Times
March 09, 2006

Rising star Evans has friends in high placesBy Neil Harman, Tennis Correspondent









WHAT do Roger Federer, Gaël Monfils, Richard Gasquet and Dan Evans have in common? All have won the junior title at Marcq-en-Baroeul, a speck on the map in northeast France.

Victory there last week for Evans, a 15-year-old from Birmingham, confirmed him as the No 1 under-16 player in the European Tennis Association — not bad for a lad whose first inclination as a racket player was to stick with squash.

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The British propensity to clutch at straws where junior tennis success is concerned — yes, they win, they flourish for a while, then they become accountants — means that Evans’s ascent to such an exalted level is best taken with a pinch of salt. The most encouraging element of all is that the youngster also sees it that way. “I don’t look too much at the rankings,” he said. “It’s nice, but that’s about it.”

Oh for more whose heads are not turned by the presumption that victories gained at junior level equate with the guarantee of a bountiful future. It is not meant to put Evans, an attacking player more in the mould of Tim Henman than Andy Murray, off what he is doing with immense proficiency, but Britain has had more than its fair share of teenagers who had plenty of talent but lacked that je ne sais quoi that marks the difference between potential and productivity.

What might prove an exception this time — and offer Murray the prospect of company at the top level in the years to come — is that Evans is part of a group at the LTA’s Loughborough Academy who seem to fire each other’s competitive juices. “Well, I’m not sure if it is the same for all of them, but it’s true for me,” he said.

And so if Lewis Barnes, Dan Smethurst, Andrew Brigham, Elliott Chang and James Richardson are keen to celebrate Evans’s success, the hope has to be that their appetites have been seriously whetted.

As Henman has found for the past ten years and Murray has discovered in ten months, Britain has suffered for having success on a one-man basis. Not everyone can hope to emulate the French, the Spaniards and the Argentinians, but if the LTA’s desire to have five players in the top 100 by 2008 is to be anywhere near being fulfilled, it needs at least a dozen in the top 200 to be starting with. And so on down the line. Elements of encouragement such as Evans’s place on top of a very strong under-16 European field cannot be underestimated.

The fact that he trailed his French opponent 5-2, 40-0 in the final in Marcq-en-Baroeul in front of 1,500 locals and came back to win in straight sets says a good deal, too, about the depths of his courage. “I do the best I can to keep his feet on the ground,” Mark Taylor, Evans’s Australian coach, said. “There is a long way to go.”

The upshot of his victory — after that as a member of the Great Britain team at the Under-14 World Championship with Barnes and Dan Cox last year that spurred him, three years out of his age group, to the final of the under-18 nationals in Bournemouth — is that Evans was offered a wild card into the £10,000 Futures event in Sunderland this week. He lost in the opening round to James Auckland, ranked No 335 in the world, having won the first set.

As Henman and Greg Rusedski prepare to bow out of the sport, the progress of British players promises to come under intense scrutiny. The development of Evans and Cox, who has moved to Marbella, Spain, where his parents own a restaurant, is just what Roger Draper, the LTA chief executive in waiting, needs to take the pressure off.

And it is welcome news for David Felgate, the director of performance, who is touring South America with the latest intake to LTA national training. It looks as if the boys’ part of the bargain is being fulfilled — but what of the girls?