Hmm, rather peculiar antipathy to matters UTR. But then it follows previous bracketing posts from a Universal Tennis Rating person with kitchen spam ?! Last time I noticed we were a tennis forum and while of course there is no doubt profit and self interest in publicising UTR, it was not unreasonable to do so here with here where there are people with some interest in a not uninteresting product, which is already used by many. Marketing and giving relevant information to likely interested parties are not mutually exclusive.

Anyway, moving on, I brought up UTR here as I thought it rather relevant to Steven's post about the dangers lurking in draws particularly from players whose senior ranking bears little relation to their relative ability. He mused : "Surely it can't be completely beyond the powers that be to come up with a seeding system that takes junior and college results into account in some kind of sensible way."

I initially was merely saying that of course there is UTR, which has apparently been used in some minor tournaments. Now I am actually personally no particular UTR advocate with regard to seeding, particularly senior tournaments. While they have their issues ( usually different issues with different folk ), particularly re young / college players I'd still tend to use existing senior ATP / WTA rankings for seedings. The cream still rise to the top, the real cream fairly quickly. But UTR is there as a discussion point with regards to what Steven was bringing up.

Re the point of some real problem in mixing supposedly two such distinct groups as juniors and seniors, some clearly play both although very many not so, UTR still serves as a legitimate attempt ( no doubt with points one can argue about ) to put all players on the same scale. I don't accept that this is necessarily impossible and / or undesirable.

As to the specific Katie vs Michaela there is more here than simply that the result "merely confirms world number 402 beat the world number 759". Katie has a full set of 16 counters, albeit still within a year of her return from a year out so I see still see plenty upside. Michaela has just 10 counters, indeed 13 tournaments in total within the last year, so no doubt with a full compliment she would be ranked rather higher and like most juniors of such age and ability is also on a fairly upward curve. In truth I was prepared for Michaela having played less senior tournaments than she has and there are undoubtably much better examples of drastically underranked junior or college players. Their UTR ratings, being well within 1 point of each other, indicated a likely competitive match and I was not oversurprised that it had Michaela ahead. Anyway, I doubt UTRs are going anywhere, and as I mentioned the LTA are now apparently very much cooperating. While still no doubt more relevant for colleges, where many use them and regard them well. I think more purpose is served by discussion within tennis as to how they might be better collated / used better than turning face against them.

And no doubt they could still be improved. In the modern world it is so much easier to generate statistics, but those can be badly / inappropriately used through either genuine ignorance or deliberate misleading. As a trained statistician not only do I have a liking and affinity for stats I am often only too well aware of them being used inappropriately often through how data is collected and interpreted. I saw this often in my workplace. I am not sure how pointing to such a generally thought of misuse in relation to measles advances this particular discussion, maybe more diverges.

Finally if there any available statistics regards results for the Scotsman and the blancmanges, particularly including information on their opponents, then if these are passed to UTR I am sure they can be considered for a rating

Freya and Laura are 5-7 *2-3 in their doubles against van Nguyen and Yurovski (the USA pair)

Edit - typo

It got worse. You do really think they could have one that they lost 5-7 5-7.

sorry, I was trying out the audio dictation on my phone here !