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Andy Murray will win Miami.

ha, i love the bit at the end with the question-answers. good blog jonathan.

i guess i've never really thought about it like that but mens and womens tennis very much are 2 seperate spheres.

in all honesty i'm a keen follower of the mens game and an occasional (mostly slams) observer of the ladies, but it is great to see kim clijsters coming back! now let's see if we can get sue barker to persuade steffi graf and navratilova out of retirement and maybe it'll tempt Larry Scott to carry on his good work

Integration would be hard because of the inevitable accusations of sexist bias that would be drawn against either side from the other. It is a fact that the women's game (at least right now) is of a poor standard, and that over time the Men's game has always been consistently better. In a physical Sport where full body conditioning and raw power are major factors, the male will usually fair better, and if neutrals are watching to see examples of human excellence, they will favour the men's game...Unfortunate for tennis, maybe, but what can one do. Equality can't always be universal. The genders have their innate differences, and I'm really not surprised that the ATP fear the goose-stepping shoulder pads of the WTA. Right now, as a spectator, it LOOKS like different sports, so perhaps they should be treated as such until they actually are more similar...

Great blog, Jonathan. It really underlines the split between the the ATP and WTA.

I do like Tennis a great deal, and avid follower of other sports too, I always felt the French Open and Wimbledon too close together, given there is also Queens club in between too. Tennis would do better to have more weeks between those Grand Slams , a month maybe. Being so close together they can reward a player in form during that period too much, or also make someone overly fatigued, or an injured player will miss both tournaments. And also the threat of viewer 'fatigue'. Golf (ok a different sport with different demands, but with a similar Grand Slam event profile) ensures a month between each tournament.

Good article but one has to admit that a merger wouldn't work. ATP tour generates much more income than the WTA and would therefore always have the upper hand in price and scheduling. I can see the WTA being bossed around / bullied / dismissed. It wouldn't last long.
A joint venture seems a better option. I would personally had liked the title master kept and be joined tournaments, not WTA' one week after the ATP'. After that there are so any concurrent tournament it doesn't really mater.
Prices or joint events should also be equal.

Also, I'm looking forward to seeing Kim play at Wimbledon during the Centre Court Celebration in May. I'm most looking forward to seeing Andre of course but I think Kim vs Steffi will alse be good. I just hope it will be a tad more competitive than when they last played.

I'm not sure it matters too much whether men's and women's tennis follow the same formula. I do agree that the off-season could be longer, and that RG and Wimbledon are too close together, but these are things that are actually unanimous amongst the WTA and ATP.

great blog Jonathan - I find the politics involved in some sports amazingly self destructive at times.

It's interesting to see the ATP and WTA get together for their online TV product TennisTV.com. I wonder if that's a signal for the future at all?

Women's tennis is dire.

I don't think Vera Zvonareva will ever lose to Kim Clijsters again. Although Clijsters is 5:0 against Vera, all those matches came when Clijsters was ranked #2-7 and Vera #25-57 - and three of those matches went to a third set, while Vera retired just three games into their Eastbourne 2006 encounter - the week before her only two-set loss to Clijsters.

Now Vera has established herself as a top-five player and a Premier champion, and it is unrealistic to expect Clijsters to return to the level she was at before she retired and had a baby.

Women's tennis is much stronger and deeper now than it was in 2003 - even with the setbacks it has suffered in the last 10 months. There are half a dozen genuine contenders for every Major now. Clijsters won't be one of them.

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Still no word on Nadal's win!

I have been following tennis for a long time now, but never have I witnessed such biased coverage.

Your website is always quick to feed us news about Murray and Federer, paying little or attention to Nadal. It would be hard to simply dismiss this as a coincidence because this is something I have noticed for a long time.

When Federer was the world N0.1, I thought that was why he was getting all that attention. But this trend has continued even today, long after he has been dethroned by Nadal.

Murray's on the other hand can only be explained on the basis that he is British. How else can a player who has never won a grand slam be getting more media attention than Nadal.

Results and analyses of Murray's and federer's matches are usually posted soon after the matches ended with usually catchy headlines, such as "Federer blows ... away." While Nadal's matches are succeeded by unusually prolonged delays with such livid headlines as "Nadal advances to the next round."

I noticed and still notice the same trend in women tennis. Your fascination used to be with Sharapova, now it is with Safina and Jankovic, at the expense of the williams sisters, even when the latter are clearly better than their opponents.

I know it can be hard sometimes to hide our emotions, and I know how much we would love our favourite players to do well in the game. But it is not a good idea to use the media to advance that goal when the players fail to achieve the same feat in the court.

Still no word on Nadal's win!

I have been following tennis for a long time now, but never have I witnessed such biased coverage.

Your website is always quick to feed us news about Murray and Federer, paying little or attention to Nadal. It would be hard to simply dismiss this as a coincidence because this is something I have noticed for a long time.

When Federer was the world N0.1, I thought that was why he was getting all that attention. But this trend has continued even today, long after he has been dethroned by Nadal.

Murray's on the other hand can only be explained on the basis that he is British. How else can a player who has never won a grand slam be getting more media attention than Nadal.

Results and analyses of Murray's and federer's matches are usually posted soon after the matches ended with usually catchy headlines, such as "Federer blows ... away." While Nadal's matches are succeeded by unusually prolonged delays with such livid headlines as "Nadal advances to the next round."

I noticed and still notice the same trend in women tennis. Your fascination used to be with Sharapova, now it is with Safina and Jankovic, at the expense of the williams sisters, even when the latter are clearly better than their opponents.

I know it can be hard sometimes to hide our emotions, and I know how much we would love our favourite players to do well in the game. But it is not a good idea to use the media to advance that goal when the players fail to achieve the same feat in the court

im not sure its cool to say women's tennis was poor in 2003...what Henin, Williams in prime, Capriati, Davenport, Mauresmo, and the undeniable talents of Kournikova

The men's game will let the Women's tour in at it's peril. I think the ATP know thay have a vastly superior product. End of. The competition is better, the players are better and fitter. It is F1 versus F3. It is vaguely ridiculous that fear of being branded sexist gave the women equal prize meoney in competitions where they generate about 20% of the income and a similar amount of interest. But they shouted loudly, threatened a bit and the tournaments caved. It would have been interesting to see, if they had held their ground, how long the players on the Women's tour would have held out for. Some of the women's top 10 and most of the top 20 are truly dire. Some can't even serve and look very unconditioned and unfit. It is an amateur attitude that prevails in some of the players, if you can earn a million a year and be top 20 whilst being unfit, why bother getting fit? That is why fewer people care about the women's game because it is waaaay below peak and a long way behind the men's game.

Women's tennis is much more attractive to watch than men's tennis, because if you look past some of the muscular specimens near the top of the WTA rankings, there are plenty of cute East-European girls who hit the ball with flairsome power, and play delectable spreading rallies.

A key difference between men's and women's tennis is that the women tend to stand inside the court to be truly involved in the rallies, whereas the men tend to stand outside the lines, so they're more like part of the surroundings. Men's tennis can be lethally boring on clay.

Women's tennis now has much more depth than the men's game, with half a dozen genuine contenders for every Women's Singles Major, whereas Nadal and Federer tend to make the other top men rather anonymous!

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You only have to put Wimbledon back by a week to make a difference. Then you could have Queens the week after Roland Garros, a Masters event in Halle the next week, then a week's break, then Wimbledon. Wimbledon would finish the week before the Open starts. You would only lose the grass tournament in Newport from the calendar. Every 4 years you might clash with the World Cup Final, but depending where that is held Wimbledon should be over before the football kicks off (particularly now there's a roof).

People have been suggesting putting Wimbledon back two weeks for years - in order to have four weeks of grass-court events between the French Open and Wimbledon - but the constraints on the calendar are so tight that it will probably never happen.

My suggestion is to move the French Open forward two weeks instead, and drop two weeks somewhere between the Australian Open and Indian Wells. That would make the gaps between the four Majors a little more even, and help to relieve the burden between major tournaments in an Olympic year.