Thank goodness for that, Wimbledon has finished for another year, we can finally stop pretending to care about tennis and we can stop banging on about why Britain fails to produce enough world class players.
Let’s face it, tennis isn’t really a popular sport in this country, it’s isn’t played in state schools, it isn’t generally played in inner-cities and, apart from the month of June, it rarely gets widespread media attention.
Sure, it has a sizeable following, but the only time the masses get involved is in June when Wimbledon forces its way on to prime time television like an unwanted squatter on a farmer’s field.
But every year we get them same old subjects cluttering up the airwaves and filling page after page, day after day, in our newspapers. Come on, be honest, now that he has moved on with the rest of the Tour, do you really care about Rafael Nadal’s ground stroke power or the size of his biceps?
Will you be desperate to find out whether Novak Djokovic can recover from his early exit from the All England Championship or whether Ana Ivanovic’s looks really do her match her ability?
And then there is Andy Murray, Britain’s great and only realistic hope for the future who, like Tim Henman before him, will be one of the best ten players in the world for his entire career, but still be labelled a failure because he never manages to win Wimbledon, or any of the other grand slams.
I rather like Murray, he looks as though he has got a little bit of the devil in him. He shouts, swears and screams on a tennis court and it must be so difficult for the snotty nosed tennis fans in the expensive seats to cheer for a rowdy Scot doing a Braveheart impression every time he picks up a tennis racquet!
I even watched his magnificent five-set victory over the Frenchman Richard Gasquet, before watching the British challenge ruthlessly extinguished by Nadal in the quarter-finals.
It would be nice to say Murray is the coming man who will eventually depose Nadal as the best player in the world, but the two are roughly the same age and you suspect the Spaniard’s muscular frame will always leave plucky (all defeated Brits are plucky) Murray in his shadow, even after the previously dominant Roger Federer has retired.
And in the mean time the search for another world class Brit will quietly continue, while we turn our attention back to football, cricket and rugby. Loads of youngsters will be built up as the next big thing and then fail year after year, only ever appearing in the first round of Wimbledon as a wild card entry before heading home on the back of a straight sets defeat to the Belarus number two!
Honestly, the inquest into the demise of British tennis has been going on for decades and still, despite millions of pounds invested, national academies and elite coaches we haven’t found a solution. Ultimately, though, for all of the time, money and effort that has been wasted, when tennis is only important for a few weeks a year, it really isn’t that surprising is it?
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