The circumstances aren't great but there must be quite a number of men and women earning more from competition tennis than they've ever earned.
Definitely, it would be great to somehow keep some of these events, like this , battle of Brits or some sort of british nationals as a regular part of the season. Maybe somehow look at the British Tour and bolster the money and format to reflect some of the things that have come from all these events like the Pro Tour.
I cetainly think the format works really and is something the ITF should look at. Round robins at the lower levels, even in the Fast4 format would be far better for the players at 15k level and qualifying at 25k level.
One thing they could have done here was put a lot of effort into stats. Given it is supported by the betting companies, there must be a massive demand for stats like we are used to seeing - basic head to heads across the series would be easy (ie over 5 weeks, Player A has played Player B 3 times and won 2 in 3 sets etc. ) through to proportion of MTB's won, break points saved and so on and so forth.
Shame they havent seemed to have captured any of those and certainly not published them.
I posted this on the Womens thread. However thought I'd put on here as well. I read about this week being on Eurosport player and then Freesports from Friday. I can't see anything on Eurosport but it is showing on FreeSports schedule from Friday. FreeSports is available on Freeview however I know some older receivers can't get it.
Billy was way off the pace today. Too many easy points given away when he was controlling the rally. Not sure how much he has got left in the tank after playing all 5 lead up weeks in this tournament.
Ali looked good though and will give a strong account of himself against some of the more fancied players.
I wondered whether he would've been better off missing last week and getting some rest but having looked at the prize money he would need to improve his placing by about 6 to gain financially. I'm guessing he did the sums and decided he would make more by playing last week.