Andy was really impressive today; ruthless :D

Jaffa wrote:

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korriban wrote:

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RJA wrote:

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Coup Droit wrote:

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Chris Goldsmith @TheTennisTalker 3m3 minutes ago

Yen Hsun Lu is W15 L1 on grass in 2016, only loss was to Dustin Brown in Manchester. #bbctennis #wimbledon

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 Nice to see proper context for those 15 wins provided, i.e 14 of them at challenger level.

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 Words cannot adequately describe how minimal Mr Goldsmith's contribution to tennis insight and knowledge is. He is so omnipotent that he is able to describe how a player is playing and what is going right or wrong from live scores alone. He talks. a lot! Not much else......grrrr 

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 Couldn't agree more. it isn't like me to say anything but the fella is an idiot, and seeing the bbc retweet him endlessly this week really has annoyed me.

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He annoys me a bit too (though he's fairly harmless and presumably he means well), yet he's got twice as many followers as me, so plenty of people must like what he does  (or  ... ), though someone did once say to me that they only followed him for the comedy value of his imagined commentaries. His bandwagon-jumping particularly irks me but having wholeheartedly jumped on the Marcus bandwagon this week (mainly for my own amusement), I could be accused of sitting in a glass house throwing stones 

He goes well beyond the Brits and actively (see how I resisted the temptation to use the 'd' word there ) courts new followers, following thousands of people so they'll follow him back, etc, so that may be why. Maybe that's the way to go (a lot of successful accounts do it that way) but I prefer to stick to a niche, do it as well as I can, only follow a limited number of people so I have a fighting chance of actually reading (or at least skimming) all of my timeline, though even that fails at Wimbledon time, and get new followers organically. I'd rather have fewer followers than people following me who aren't at all interested in the crap I write.

As for the BBC RTing him so much this week, it's partly a case of him guessing what they want and tweeting it with the relevant tags (which I guess is an art in itself) and partly evidence of how lazy the BBC can be - possibly understandable with people doing 10-hour shifts on the BBC blog at this time of year.

Oakland2002 wrote:

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Dan's piece of work over the last 12 months has been nothing short of spectacular, I finally sense a realisation that he now understands how much talent he has and what he needs to do to make something of it.

I cannot be more pleased for him. The more British tennis players having success from as many different backgrounds as posdible the better. There will be athletic kids sitting down in erdington having watching Dan win today (because Wimbledon is on terrestrial TV) thinking if he can do that so can I.

So a big up and keep it up to Evo!

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I don't think that Evo has ever failed to understand how much talent he has. The real difference is that he has finally decided that he wants to be a professional tennis player rather than a guy who just plays tennis.

Steven, I've sat in on pitches where start-ups etc. get funding partly based on the number of followers they have. It's true that it's taken very seriously and can (repeat CAN) be a sign of traction that is valuable.
However, I know that there are people in India - and presumably elsewhere - who charge simply to create zillions of twitter accounts and follow you; so unless you actually look at the followers, it's no proof of anything.
And, yes, mass 'you follow me and I'll follow you' agreements also work.

Just for me, and to back up Jaffa, I don't have a twitter account. So I look at people's tweets on line. i.e. it's an active decision each day who to check, no automatic following.
And I look at yours at least once a day, every day (more in peak tennis time).
But at Chris' only occasionally i.e. for large swathes of time, I'll forget he's even there and then if I check and there's something vaguely interesting, I'll check again the next day, and maybe the next, then if nothing, I'll forget about him again....

christ wrote:

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Jaffa wrote:

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... and for christ's sake, it's my round

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 What's this got to do with me?

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Coup Droit wrote:

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But I still remember the piece, from a couple of years ago, where Dan talked about his Dad who, seemingly, had finally lost patience and said something along the lines of 'right, enough's enough, either you buckle down or get yourself a proper job, I've had it up to here'. And Dan sounding quite contrite, and a bit surprised. And since then everything has gone 100% in the right direction (injuries being outside of anyone's control, unfortunately). Well done, Dad, I say

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And from the horse's mouth in today's Times, under the headline "Next to face Federer:  the bad boy who won't be a pushover":

The parallels between Evans and Willis are striking.  In their teenage years both were regarded as among the most talented of their generation.  Both came a cropper.  While Willis, 25, accrued [  - I think that should have been "acquired".  Close, I suppose...] a penchant for Snickers and Pepsi cola in between games, Evans, 26, liked a night out.

He lost focus, funding and, briefly, his liberty after being arrested by police over a sexual assault allegation at a nightclub in Bath.  He spent 12 hours in a cell and had to wait six months before he was cleared.

In between good-natured jibes at Willis yesterday, Evans spoke of how he was moved to reform by his friends and parents, with whom he still lives in Solihull, West Midlands.  "I let a lot of people down," he said.

"It was difficult to keep letting these guys down, seeing them disappointed in what I'd been doing.  Gradually, the message got through, but it took a few knocks at the door."

Just over a year ago he was ranked 772nd in the world, the same as Willis on the eve of Wimbledon.  After some hard work and pain he has broken into the top 100.  The wild boy for once did not need a Wimbledon wild card.

Evans stressed that not all his old habits had died, however.  "I still like a night out," he said.  "It doesn't change.  Just do it at the right time."

Extract from an article in the main paper by two journos whose names I can't recall seeing before, David Sanderson & Martyn Ziegler.  I was about to ask whether anyone knew what had become of Neil Harman, but decided to look him up on Google & it turns out that, in July 2014, it emerged that he had plagiarised material for the official Wimbledon yearbook, which he had written since 2004.  He admitted the allegation & subsequently resigned from the International Tennis Writers' Association.  Unsurprisingly, he was then suspended from The Times.

That's by the by, however.  To revert to the original topic, Evo certainly now comes over as a reformed character. 

For those Spanish speakers among us, here is a report from "El Mundo", one of the national papers in Spain. Not sure Marcus would appreciate being called an "Amateur", but I think I know what they mean.

www.elmundo.es/deportes/2016/06/29/57740a2fca4741084b8b45c4.html

And you will find some great pictures here as well

www.elmundo.es/album/deportes/2016/06/29/57740628e5fdeac8568b4672_9.html