A really great final, the contrast in styles made for a fascinating watch. For periods they were well matched, some great winners especially from Dan. Looking at tennislive.co.uk stats and they seem well matched at this point in their careers as well with Kyle winning 325 from 517 matches, 62.86% win rate. Dan amazingly with todays result just overtakes Kyle, now showing as 475 from 755, a win rate of 62.91%, almost identical.
SF: Daniel Evans (WR 28) defeated Andy Murray (WR 129) by 1-6 6-3 [10-8]
Still a good week for Andy.
and he has a third place play off tomorrow as well , it turns out!
He's withdrawn with a shin problem. His place will be taken by Dino & Andy will apparently be on court "in a coaching capacity" for him.
For "shin problem" read "knackered". I think 4 games in 5 days was enough for him at the moment.
Andy sheds some light on the question - an extract from the end of Rick Broadbent's report in today's Times:
[...] this will go down as a great week for the Murray brothers, too [i.e. as well as for Dan]. Jamie proved a skilled tournament director, while Andy showed enough class in his three-set defeat by Evans to suggest a revival is in the offing. He sat out the third-place match to preserve his sore shins, but was in a corner of the court to help his stand-in, James Ward, as he took on Cameron Norrie. Murray's brand of encouragement was evident from one aside caught by the microphones. "You've got two weeks in Virginia to sit on your arse before your next match," he said to Ward.
The tough love was to no avail and Norrie won 6-3 7-5. Afterwards, Murray said: "I am okay. This week is by far the most I have done in the last seven months. I mean my left shin has been an issue coming and it was a bit sore after my first match." He will expect to be ready for the restart of the ATP Tour at the Citi Open in Washington DC in August.
And a bit more insight from Jamie into the stresses of organising the event, not to mention missing this year's Wimbledon & the prospects of his playing the USO.
I wondered if anyone had heard anything more about the new ST James Place Battle of the Brits Team event and who might be playing, how the teams would be comprised?
I see Leon Smith and Anne Keothavong are two of the 4 team captains. It looks like each team will have 2 - so one more mens (Tim Henman?) and one woman (Annabel Croft, Sam Smith?) to come...
Yeah, a new thread will be good nearer the time, but there does seem to be very little info 6 days out. Who are people expecting to play? Most of the top men (not playing WTT), Dart, Konta, Watson, Boulter etc? Maybe Burrage?
Cheers TA, I was literally reading that same article about 5 mins before I posted that, ha, and the 'star studded' kind of made me assume it would be the likes of Evans, Edmund, Watson, Konta and co. BBC online / iPlayer is pretty good as it will be far more widely available, even though Amazon's coverage of the first BotB was excellent the other month.