JonH comes home wrote:

---

Michael D wrote:

---

Peter too wrote:

---

R2: MURRAY SHARAN, Samantha (GBR) 8 218 lost to FETT, Jana (CRO) 238 6-4 4-6 3-6

Samantha's service went downhill until the near the end. In the 3rd set she was winning 30% on both 1st and 2nd serves, then she won four 1st serves in a row to take the penultimate game. Up until then she was doing better on her opponents serve. Very odd.

---

Yes Sam seems to be having a crisis of confidence at the moment, and considering the comments made about Fett having the same, sadly Sam seems to have allowed Fett to find a way of winning again, or rather, of allowing her opponent to do the losing this time. 

 -- Edited by Michael D on Thursday 20th of February 2020 03:02:23 PM

---

 I suspect being newly married and apart in different continents will affect her game. My whole attitude to work travel changed when  I was married, never really recovered in terms of enjoying it, a sort of necessary evil, but those first few months where tough.

---

Yes, may well be the case Jon.  

Another spectacular success for the LTA. Only Fran and Jodie have spared their blushes (Neither in the UK). Will they ever learn !.

Have no home 15Ks ( guess there is little left to say about this ) and time the Glasgow 25K as the only 25K in Europe so it's rammed enough to send some of our genuine 25K players to other parts, like India for a week. Hee hum.

At least Sunderland is much kinder, and Jodie and Fran are due to fly back for it.

Obviously the first part is self explanatory, 1 main draw win, and no singles interest by Friday is grim and disappointing, but not too sure what was meant with the latter 2 points, and how has Jodie sparred their blushes by beating somebody unranked, and another 900 odd in India? Gabi's had tougher opposition in a Tunisian W15.

A few additional (not replacement) home W15s would be great for some of these younger players like Ali Collins (probably the prime example going off PaulM's analysis the other day), and maybe Grace and Holly, but I certainly wouldn't want them to get rid of the W25s, and think it's perfectly acceptable having back to back W25s at this time of year. Glasgow ran at exactly the same time last year, and Maia reached the semi final, Fran beat the 3rd seed, and Emma got a good win. Jodie regularly plays the GB events, and came through an equally tough, if not tougher, draw at Bolton in April reaching the final (beating Emma in the semi final, so a successful GB tournament in one that included solid player like Badosa, Kalinskaya, Anderson, Shinikova - all of whom beaten by Brits), but she's obviously been struggling for a while, not the LTAs fault, so she probably purposely chose what she thought would be a weaker field to get something going and easier points.

Maia would normally play these events, certainly Glasgow, but is injured, again not the LTAs fault. Harriet played Sunderland last year, and got to the final, and the option would have been there for her to play this. Sam was a seed here, so would have been projected to make the QF, she won Chiswick last year, so when these tournaments were thought out, they probably thought she might be able to make a decent run. Emma was seemingly well on her way to beating Beniot the other day, and these are exactly the type of fields she needs at this point, and if she faced Ahn and gave her a good match, win or lose, we'd all have been excited, but that was obviously a massively unfortunate situation what happened. Katie B played an indoor French W25 last week, when there was only one other parralel European W25.

Not everyone is going to want to play, not everyone will be fit, or in a lot of cases, not everyone will in form at a given time, but we have a group of 10 or so players - HD, KB, KS, SM, NBa, JB, KD, GT, FJ, ER, ML, who are, or should be, capable of doing well, or at least holding their own, in reasonably strong home W25s, you could even just about include Heather if you wanted, as top 100 players like Badosa and Diatchenko still play their fair share of W25s, so while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, a one off before US/Mexico wouldn't have been unheard of, but unfortunately this week, for a variety of reasons, none of this happened, and it turned out to be a massive disappointment.

There's plenty of things that the LTA could learn from, but I don't think this is one of them, and I for one hope Glasgow W25 is back next year, combined with another venue the following or previous week, whether that be Sunderland again, Shrewsbury, Edgbaston, wherever - and if they can include a W15 or 2 either side of the 2 W25 events, then even better, but I don't think the LTA can be blamed for putting on a couple of W25s in February - the more the better I say.

Strongbow wrote:

UK 25Ks are always over-subscribed - so a tough field. Working on cut-off stats at the mo. Should prove relevant. Fran and Jodie playing in India rather than Glasgow (relieving a glum day for GBR women. I'll re-post on this when I've sorted the stats out.

---

I agree that GB W25s are usually tough and you'll often have multiple top 200 players, and even top 100 players as we've seen with Ahn here, and Diatchenko last year in Bolton, but we had 7 W25s last year (Glas, Bolt, Sund, Chis, Wok, Roe x 2), and Sam won one, Jodie got to a final (and was ruled out of the latter 4), Harriet made a final, Emma made 2 SFs and a QF, and Maia also made a SF, so we can, and do have success, even in tough fields. Just remembered that Maia actually won Shrewsbury W25 in either Oct or Nov 2018 as well.

I was personally far more encouraged by Jodie beating Kalinskaya, Shinikova (even if one was apparently injured according to someone on here who attended), and even Emma in the semi, than her beating 2 random players in India who I've never heard of, when she was about 1/500 to win (although it will get tougher from now on), but while it could help with short term confidence, help preserve her ranking (as she has a ton of points to defend before the grass), and generate a few  on here, it's done very little for her stock, and if her comeback had gone better than it did, I reckon she'd have been in Glasgow this week, like she was last year (as well as Shrewsbury, Bolton and Sunderland, pre her Surbiton injury).

Fran doesn't seem to play many GB events, I think Glasgow might have been her only GB W25 last year, but she too hasn't picked up many points in the past 6 months, as this is only her 3rd event since August, so she could have been strategically targeting fields to help preserve her ranking. 

Woking wasn't great last year, but this one has been the worst for a while, and if they were all typically like this, then I'd absolutely agree that something would need to change, but we've had enough success in the other W25 events stretching back to Shrewsbury 18, to make me happy to stick with them, and also take great joy from a notable scalp or a title.

Status Quo wrote:

---

If holding a preponderance of $15K were some panacea, then surely Egypt & Turkey would be dominating the WTA rankings.

---

It's a balance that's being discussed. At the moment the LTA holds British Tour events instead but they're not the same as W15s. I think to hold one or two W15 events before a couple of W25s as we have now would indeed be a good idea for some of the younger players, both to give them some more competitive matches, and to help them with the first step on the ladder.

The LTA too seems inclined to see things in black and white terms rather than in a more nuanced balanced way. Putting on a few W15s in one year is not spoon feeding younger players, or discouraging them to make the effort to go to other W15s elsewhere. Rather give them an opportunity to gain 1-2 counters in the UK and they will be more motivated to go and get that final counter in Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt or wherever. But in my book only holding W25s and above in the UK is clearly inadequate for younger players.

As for Egypt and Turkey, their hosting of multiple W15 events is not a strategy of their tennis federations but are private initiatives. No one would claim, including those running the events that W15s alone are going to foster a whole cadre of national players. In fact those running these private initiatives require players from multiple countries to come to the events for them to be financially affordable.