Hi all,

There follows quite a long opinion piece, this being a typically quiet Sunday in clay season..

First up, a disclaimer. I think my favourite surface, as a spectator, is probably clay. I realise that this makes me very unusual among Brit tennis fans, but its my acknowledged bias. I find grass to be too serve-dominated; with modern racquets, fitness training etc, too much hard court tennis is played at shoulder height or above, and bears little resemblance to the game I used to play a bit and watch back in the days of wooden racquets and Dan Maskell. I really prefer the cat and mouse of a 20 shot clay court rally to the wham-bam-thankyou ma'am power contest that more often succeeds on both grass and hard courts. I expect most people reading this to disagree, and I have no problem with that. No accounting for taste; different strokes for different folks; each to their own, and vive le difference. I'm not even trying to change anybody's opinion, or taste.

So I feel more than most a lot let down at this time of year, fairly much expecting that the Brits will be making early exits from all the big tournaments, from Madrid through Rome to RG. We are bad at clay.

But is that an inevitable fact of life? Or are there reasons? And is it really a problem? Can it be addressed as a problem? And is it worth trying to fix it?

It causes all sorts of problems. At a rough guesstimate, around 60% of the tournament calendar is played on hard courts, 30% on clay, and less than 10% on grass or other. Grass tournaments are always going to be the most important for British tennis, but take up 5 weeks or so of a 52 week calendar. It is virtually impossible to succeed in the sport as a grass court specialist. You can make a career playing well on hard courts only over 52 weeks, or well on clay only over 45 weeks. Not grass over 5 weeks.

Then there are important instances where playing on clay is unescapable. Recently in the Fed Cup - yeah we won, but by universal consensus, miraculously; later this year in the Olympics, with £millions of funding at stake; for the top players, they have to play the Slams and the 1000 tournaments also. This means we are passing up on a lot if we just shrug it all off as being clay court tennis, and meekly accepting the likelihood of failure.

I also think it adversely affects the careers of many of our players if they have limited opportunities on clay. An example could be Katie Dunne, perhaps. Comparable junior record to Katie Boulter, but grew up shorter and less powerful, and at a disadvantage on hard courts; but with much better defensive skills, excellent movement and hand skills, and I have a hunch that she might have also reached the WTA top 100, if she had been given encouragement, coaching and opportunities to develop as a clay/grass player. Or right at the summit of the Brit women for a decade or so, Heather; clearly her first big arrival was as US Open Girls champ - but in the women's game, for the first 5 or 6 years of her career, her most successful surface by win% was clay - perhaps as a result of a Guernsey childhood. It is now her worst surface, perhaps as a result of being ensconced within the British system.

I fully accept that grass is always going to be the most important surface for Brits, until Wimbledon is no longer the biggest prize in tennis; but I'd really question whether ignoring clay court tennis is the way to improve on grass. Way back when I first started watching the sport, Bjorn Borg was establishing himself as possibly the GOAT (up til then) player to grace the courts of SW19; as commentary singled out his topspin forehand as the GOAT weapon that any player had ever brought to the court, and some suggestion that it was actually a clay court shot. Nadal has won Wimbledon. Djokovic's defensive splits manouevres on all surfaces are derived from the clay court slide.

To my mind there are many more similarities between clay court and grass court tennis than either of them share with hard court tennis. Height of bounce, efficacy of spin, irregularity of bounce. There are certainly transferable skills; the lease of grass court practice hath all too short a date, and as individual rallies tend to be much shorter, less gets practiced than on clay; it would also be better for our players if they werent approaching the grass season on the back of consecutive R1 losses on clay.

Sorry to have gone on so long. Better out than in, and better here than elsewhere, where I may have appeared to be laying some of the blame for some of this sorry state of affairs at the feet of a blameless 15yo girl.

British tennis is poor on clay. This is 30% approx of the sport. We host no clay tournaments, and have few courts even, and lack expert coaches.