Alan Wright returns in qualifying here this week. He had a number of promising results towards the end of last year so hopefully he can build on that. I guess we won't be able to find out where he has been for the last few months, maybe an injury?
Anyway, he finds himself as the 8th seed in qualifying and has a bye through to round 2. There he will face either Radovan Sabata of Slovakia or Pietro Fanucci of Italy, neither of whom has, or has ever had a world ranking. Looking ahead, Petar Jelenic (WR 665) awaits in final qualifying.
As a sidenote, Joachim Johansson should be appearing in the main draw here.
What is Alan doing trying to qualify for a challenger?
He should take a leaf out of Myles Blake's book and go and play a futures tournament in Chad or Tadjikistan. If he could get a few more points on the board he could enter the main draw of decent futures events and start getting some recognition for the matches he wins.
btw Myles Blake will play Senegal F1 next week and I'd say he has an excellent chance of doing well.
Alan's been out of action for just over a month, as GC77 says, probably due to injury. He had a couple of near misses in the final rounds of futures qualifying in Spain in May and then played a couple of challengers at the start of June where he lost in the first qualifying round.
Alan did actually qualify for a challenger in autumn 2005, albeit in a very weak field in the Ukraine, he then lost to Volchkov in rd1.
I think that the need for money lies behind his decision to go for challenger qualifying. Although he's unlikely to make it into the singles main draw, if the challenger field is weak enough then he'll probably make it into the doubles main draw and then earn a small amount of dosh even if he loses in rd1. Then he'll be able to have a go at a futures qualies.
I do agree with Niall that it would be more sensible to head for the African futures where the fields are so weak that he'd stand a good chance of getting to the quarters or possible further !
Alan plays his rd1 doubles match today.
-- Edited by UltimateFlemingFan at 14:58, 2006-07-25
I just want to clarify that I am not advocating Myles Blake's somewhat creative approach to tournament scheduling. He has done well at acumulating ranking points but I don't think playing so many weak events will help him if and when he enters a tournament in the first world.
I just think Alan could give himself a week off from playing the toughest event available, get some cheap points the maybe dodge the thankless task of playing qualies every week.
