Do you not have to put at least two tournaments in a row as that M25 is a lone tournament? Sure that use to be the case.

Madadman wrote:

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Do you not have to put at least two tournaments in a row as that M25 is a lone tournament? Sure that use to be the case.

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One of the changes for next year removes the requirement to hold consecutive weeks tournaments. The intention is that reduce costs will give opportunities for more countries to hold tournaments.

I see that the regular women's tournaments at Surbiton, Manchester, Ilkley and Southsea are all on the ITF calendar, as are also the 25k's at Woking, and Chiswick later in the year.

Not much listed for the men as yet after the end of April.

-- Edited by the addict on Wednesday 26th of December 2018 02:21:53 PM

Curious. Southsea, Woking and Chiswick don't appear for me.

I note that a 25K main draw WC is available to the winner of following British Tour tournaments and a qualifying wild card to the runner-up
BT Loughborough (January) WCs to 25K events in February (weeks 7 & 8)
BT Bolton (March) to 25K Sunderland (week 15)
BT Nottingham (July) to 25Ks in July/August (weeks 31 & 32)
BT Paddington (September) to 25K in September (weeks 38 & 39 women/week 39 men)

Not itf but in his story today in the mail online (I know, sorry) Mike dickson comments that the two challengers arranged in April last season, Glasgow is moving to September and Loughborough has been canned after one year.

Does anyone know if there is n official list of Gb events next year, Challenger and itf?

It still says 2018 for Southsea which may be a concern. We don't do badly on a widewide scale, but other countries have so many more, so the more the better.

I was looking at the WTA Shenzhen qual results and saw Lin Zhu lost to a Chinese player I'd never heard tell of (Fang Yin Xun) and I was surprised to see her ranked as high as 212 (I thought I was familiar with pretty much all the top 300 on the women's side). I had a quick look at her 2018 to see where all her points game from and of the 25 tournaments she played, 23 were in mainland China, 1 in nearby Taiwan and the other in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, she's pretty much never had to leave her home country (or at least somewhere with a completely different culture) to achieve a ranking around the top 200, and that's a massive advantage.

I think Australia has lost a couple of their women's ITFs in 2019 (which may be a blow to some of our girls), but they had 15 ITF events in 2018, 6 of them 60k which is a lot better than what GB had last year - 6 25ks and the 4 100k warm ups, one of which is restricted to just 2 home players looking to take advantage (and no quals) and the other 3 are prime warm ups to arguably the most significant tournament of the year and thus are loaded with good players - they also coincide with the other GB bigger events, so the absolute max home events someone like Jodie, Freya, Maia etc. could play would be 10 events plus Wimbledon.

France also had 16 (25k or above). They also had a few 15ks - but that's a different matter. 8 of those 16 were 60k or above. Obviously, it can lead to questions about players being over-ranked etc. but if we had a bustling ITF scene like our fellow grand slam countries and China, then I'm sure a lot of our players ranked 400-500 like Eden, Freya, Beth etc. would all have a couple of hundred points shaved off their ranking. Japan also has a fair few 25k+ ITFs (which a lot of our girls play).

It will be hard to compete financially with USA and China and unrealistic as well, but it would be nice if we were on par with Australia and France.

-- Edited by Ace Ventura on Sunday 30th of December 2018 02:55:44 PM

Yes, Liam goes from WR312 on 24/12 to forecast WR271 on 07/01 according to OER - with 142 points on both dates.