Italy F14 - 10K [clay]

Drew · May 20, 2006

RE: Italy F14 - 10K [clay]

Madeline · Admin:Moderator + Tennis Legend

How many points is it for a 10K futures win? 12? Should move him up a few places in the rankings.

stevemcqueen · Futures qualifying

8 points for getting to the final will take him to a new carreer high of 650, wining it will take him 615. Excellent!! He is certainly not a name we hear much of. He is down for next weeks Futures F15 in Parmar, which is a $15K event. Morgan is nowhere near making the cut, will he be given an SE? If F15 was a $10k event, he definitely would get the SE, but I think the wording used is something " same level tournament" , so I am unsure....

-- Edited by stevemcqueen at 06:02, 2006-05-21

Sally · Grand Slam Champion

From MTF:

Phillips won 6-4 6-4 aganist Van Der Meer

Count Zero · Tennis legend

congrats, an amazing run!

imoen · Admin: Moderator+Tennis Legend

That's two Brit winners in Futures this week

johnnylad · Tennis legend

That is amazing. I think its the most impressive British performance for a while. Everyone he beat was officially better than him.

Kick on from here Morgan!

Can we get a photo of him form the prize ceremony?

Drew · May 21, 2006

A1 for Morgan ! that will do nicely a ranking rise of 150 places

steven · Tennis legend

Some minor but not very important corrections:

Morgan won the Final 6-3 6-3 (from the drawsheet tenniseurope.org which is marginally more likely to be accurate than MTF)

He's got a couple of points coming off this week for last year's GB Satellite, so he's going to rise well over 100 places on Monday week but not quite 150.

He did play one unranked opponent, but the other four were all ranked more than 200 places above him.

A bit more about Morgan for anyone who's interested:

Hardly a new kid on the block, Morgan has played almost all his tournaments in Spain (plus a few in Italy and the UK) and is probably the closest thing we have to a specialist clay courter.

You have to be tough to make it in Spanish Futures, as evidenced by the fact that Morgan started playing Futures/Satellite qualifying in January 2001 when he was 16 (he'll be 22 this summer) and:

- lost his first qualifying match in his first four tournaments
- didn't reach a main draw until his 19th tournament in October 2001, even then only as a LL, and got thrashed in R1
- didn't qualify for a Futures main draw without needed a LL place until about his 30th tournament in June 2002
- didn't get his first ranking point (by winning a Futures main draw match) until August 2003, as far as I can tell - that's 31 months and more than 50 tournaments after he started!

Since then, he's reached two Futures SFs, but this was his first Futures Final, let alone title. It's hard to imagine quite how much it must mean to him after putting in so much effort for so long.

Morgan finished 2003 ranked 1212, made only a small amount of progress in 2004 up to 1047th then speeded up a bit last year, moving to 742nd. He'd actually moved down a few places sofar this year but this week's success will see him rise into the low 600s.

Morgan doesn't play in GB much, but came over a couple of times last year and best Mark Hilton twice as well as thrashing Slabba 2 & 1 in one tournament - evidence, if any was needed, that players at any given level in the rankings who got most of their points in Spain are significantly stronger than those who get most of their points in the UK. (not that I'm saying Slabba doesn't put in the airmiles, he certainly does!)

Anyway, there's clearly some potential there, so let's hope he won't be a one-week wonder. I wonder how much he can build on this week (he's got an SE into Parma but would play the no. 1 seed in R2) - his confidence must be sky-high at the moment.

I hope the LTA give this win a big write-up on their new site.

Sheddie · administrator

All I can say is wow, wow, wow !!!! What an amazing week for Morgan Phillips !!

These last couple of weeks have most definately made up for the dreadful weeks in British tennis from mid April to the beginning of May. Having 3 winners in two weeks in overseas futures events has been fantastic.

Morgan's ranking will move up to about 624 next week a leap of nearly 150 places ! He's just 3 points of the top 600.

Last week will have been the best of his career by some way. As steven said, he's started making some big strides in the last year, reaching some futures semis last autumn and reaching a quarter-final in Spain in April. He's still only 21 so he could definately go a lot higher. Futures in Italy and Spain tend to have the strongest fields and Andy Murray is the only other Brit to have won a clay-court futures in Italy so Morgan is in illustrious company.

The rankings of the opponents he beat last week:

Rd1: 468, Rd2: unranked, QF: 364, SF: 459, Final: 509

The best win was definately the quarter-final victory over Baccanello who's a class player - as I said earlier in this thread, he outplayed an on-form Andy Murray last August.

at the LTA for not giving this splendid achievement a proper report on their site.

steven · Tennis legend

UltimateSlabbaFan wrote:

The best win was definately the quarter-final victory over Baccanello who's a class player - as I said earlier in this thread, he outplayed an on-form Andy Murray last August.

Indeed, and of course he'd beaten Morgan himself 3 & 3 in Bournemouth only a couple of weeks earlier.

UltimateSlabbaFan wrote:

at the LTA for not giving this splendid achievement a proper report on their site.

This is indeed an absolute disgrace. Even on the weekly update at http://www.lta.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/75788C7B-61BD-4E24-924B-BC1C02F6FB2A/0/060522Kuznetsova.pdf?BSMGuid=d71cede6-304f-43ce-aa09-6e96a1023eed the three main headlines are (in this order) Sveta Kuznetsova agreeing to play in Eastbourne, Sania Mirza playing the DFS Classic and Jamie winning the title in Kalamata.

Nothing against Jamie (quite the opposite in fact) but given Morgan's ranking and the quality of the opposition, his win in Napoli was by far the GB achievement of the week and while it's mentioned on page 2, I'd have expected those who ought to be in the know about how big an achievement winning any particular title is to have made a lot more of it.

Perhaps Morgan's got nothing to do with the LTA and that's the reason?

Nice to see the weekly updates back though.