British matches in QR1

Ben Pritchard (GBR) vs Oscar Sabate-Bretos (ESP)
(16)David Brewer (GBR) bye
Robert Varga (HUN) vs Richard Irwin (GBR)
Ross Connolly (GBR) vs Scott Dickson (GBR)
(WC)Joshua Miller (GBR) vs Olivier Charroin (FRA)
Burnham Arlidge (GBR) vs (WC)Chris Priddle (GBR)
(4)Ian Flanagan (GBR) bye
(WC)Peter Raynes (GBR) vs (WC)Kyle Brassington (GBR)
David Lingman (USA) vs (WC)Oscar Podlewski (GBR)
(11)Alexander Slabinsky (GBR) bye
(5)Tom Rushby (GBR) bye
Mark De Jong (NED) vs Matthew Illingworth (GBR)
Frederik Sletting-Johnsen (NOR) vs (WC)James Richardson (GBR)
Edward Allison (GBR) vs Dan Cottier (GBR)
(WC)James Feaver (GBR) vs Thomas Kromann (DEN)
Yannick Thomet (SUI) vs Daniel Jewitt (GBR)
Daniel Evans (GBR) vs Ned Boone (GBR)
Konstantinos Kalaitzis (GBR) vs Adrien Bossel (SUI)
Deniss Pavlovs (LAT) vs Matthwe Taylor (GBR)
(15)Alexander Miotto (GBR) bye

Bladetiger wrote:

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Apparently WC's are all going to younger players this year, this week they've gone to rice, thornley, dyce & milton, might have got that a bit wrong but something like that.

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Dyce is in Australia. It must be someone else. Marcus Willis maybe?

Heehee. Czech involvement in British tennis!

Thanks a lot, kid.

Bad loss for Evans. For Brewer, too.

-- Edited by Arka at 21:42, 2007-01-07

Slabba had a good win. He's been ill recently and hasn't been able to train for a while so he didn't know what to really expect from himself this week. Played a solid match though, was always in a higher class to his opponent, upped his level in set 2 and ran away with it. Should be interesting against Flanagan tomorrow, Slabba said "you never know what to expect against him !"

Go to http://www.freewebs.com/alexslabinsky

for a bit more info on Alex's win plus a 2006 season review interview I did with him yesterday. You should hopefully find it interesting

By the way, (I forgot to post this last night), Alex says that when he nexts gets back to his computer he's going to join this site and post a bit I also mentioned the idea of the blog to him again, I explained how it's interesting for the fans to hear more about the stories behind the results eg the "classic clay" fiasco when Alex was in Australia in 2006. He's playing Sheffield and Sunderland followed by at least 3 futures in France. Hopefully he'll do a blog after France F1.

I told him about Martin Lee's experiences in India, he'd heard that before. Apparently, quite a few on the tournaments there are played on dried cow dung. Alex says that all the players competing are really, really careful when they're moving, they let some balls go which they would normally run for because they're worried of falling over and catching some disease from the bacteria in the dung.

I'm not really surprised at Evans' defeat. Norby is a pretty big server and a serve-volleyer too. At the moment, Evans doesn't have a particularly big game so when he comes up against a hard hitting opponent, attacking the net a lot, on a fast surface, he's likely to have problems.

Norby's also ranked 721 while Evans has just 1 point at the moment.#

Brewer's loss is pretty disappointing though I was also hopeful that Allinson might be able to spring an upset over Groth with his big serving game but it wasn't the case.

Thanks for the inside info Bladetiger, shame about Miotto's loss, just shows how 1 point can totally change a match. Interesting decision from the LTA, good news for the likes of Cox, Dyce, Evans, Willis, Thornley and Milton. Is this just going to be for futures or will it be for challengers aswell ? I think it's a good idea for the futures will definately help those players a lot; but not for challengers at the moment as I don't think the above mentioned players are quite ready yet to compete against challenger level players. It'd be a bit daft to give Dyce for example, a wildcard into a challenger ahead of Mackin or Baker.

I wonder if they're going to just give futures wcs to U18s or whether guys like Simon Childs (who had some promising results at the end of last year) will get wcs

I wonder where Matt Smith is for this tournament, hopefully he got direct entry.

So, looking at the final qualies round, we're guaranteed 1 qualifier. Obviously in the Slabba-Flanagan match, it depends a lot on which Flanagan turns up.

Rushby's Norwegian opponent is unranked but they had a very close match a few months ago in Sunderland qualies. Rushby won 6-7, 7-6, 7-6

steven wrote:

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ultimateshedman wrote:

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I wonder where Matt Smith is for this tournament, hopefully he got direct entry.

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I'm wondering too, but he can't have got a DA because one of the players ahead of him on the Alt list is playing in qualifying.

I don't agree with the idea of giving Futures WCs exclusively to U18s. In a situation where we're only getting one DA for each home future at the moment, giving all the WCs to players likely to get KO'd in R1 unless they get drawn against each other seems like a very bad idea to me.

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Matt Smith's not there apparently.

Seems like they've pretty much given up on any of the 85-86's doing anything, and are putting their efforts into the younger ones, tho' no doubt if someone strings results together they'll support them with WC's . The message seems to be- "you wont get a WC to help you out of a slump but if you get moving yourself. we'll support you."

Lets hope some of the next 'generation'* are better than the one before.

* A generation in tennis is about 2 years.