That's ok Bethan

The biggest disappointment in this tournament was probably Boggo not making it through a couple of rounds given his form so far this year. However, such was the strength of this field there were no "easy draws" in rd1. Not getting any qualifiers was also disappointing but the top 4 seeds were all ranked close to 200 and all 8 seeds were inside the top 250.

For some reason we never generally seem to get any qualifiers at Surbiton or particularly much British success. I think it's due to 2 factors, [1] it's the first grass court tournament and a lot of the Brits haven't fully adjusted yet to the faster courts. Against a really strong field they're going to struggle. I wonder why the LTA don't schedule 2 grass-court futures events during French Open qualies and week 1 of Roland Garros. They had one at Oxford last year but took it out for some reason

[2] It has been the general consensus for a long time that Brits have an extra advantage on grass because it's their home surface. This is now a mistaken opinion. About 7-8 years ago this was the case because lots of the Brits were serve-volleyers and had games tailor-made for grass. Now all the Brits [with the exception of Martin Lee, Dave Sherwood and Jonny Marray] are baseliners. They only practise on grass for about 8 weeks per year and most of them don't list it as their favourite surfaces, preferring indoor hard courts instead. At Surbiton, the grass courts are very traditional, really fast - suiting players with massive serves and especially serve-volleyers [the reason why Moodie has won so many times here]. It's tough for baseliners at Surbiton because the balls skids through and keeps very low and passing onrushing net players can be difficult.

I'm confident that things will improve in coming weeks as the grass at Queens is quite medium paced and will suit the Brits more which is promising for the qualies. The Brits always tend to perform well above their rankings at Nottingham aswell and there's an exciting mini-national championships occurring at Raynes park next week where competition should be especially high with precious wildcards at stake.

The promising aspects from this tournament were: Lee Childs' superb form in qualies destroying two opponents ranked so much higher. Jamie Delgado and Alan Mackin also put together impressive performances, they were just unlucky that Arthurs was in their section. It was also great to see Parmar back in form on the grass, hopefully he can take that form onto Queens. With no Boggo in the wc playoff, he's definately the favourite for that.