91Èȱ¬

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The women's side of the game doesn't look too bad, with one player inside the top 50, another soon to be in the top 100 and another 3 inside the top 200, the womens game is definitely making progress. A little bit of fitness work could be the key for these players to push on.

Getting good British juniors has never been the problem in the boys/mens side of the game, the conversion rate from juniors to seniors is poor (Lee Childs, Martin Lee), as a grassroots tennis coach, I don't think the problem is with us. We work hard recruiting young players, but the reality is that most of the talented players are already in the game, the top end coaching needs to get these 17 and 18 year olds and get the commitment drilled into them.

Makes you appreciate how good the efforts of Tim Henman were, pushing past perhaps were he should have been time and again with all the pressure of the UK on him. Frequently now mocked by some, he did more in the game than any of the current crop (bar Murray and maybe Robson) will.

Perhaps, there should be a cut off with these players, 23/24 if they are not there or getting there by then (there being top 100) then cut them loose. If they have teh required drive they will still make it and the money not being spent on the likes of Bogdanovic, can go on the Laura Robson's and others who at 15/16 are emerging through and need support to get there.

I don't know about the others, but I met James Ward a few years ago, he's scraped by for years with no support from the LTA, living in Spain with his mother and sister (I think). Losing to the 7th seed could hardly be called an upset.
Let's put things into a bit more of a context and maybe look a little bit more at the individuals. If they get significant funding and don't perform, cutting their funding may be appropriate, but if they've not been funded in the first place, maybe we should asking questions of the LTA support system ??

Agree with lazyjohn here. Before everyone gets excited about massive £10k paydays, for nearly all of the British players, this money (of which a third is about to go to the taxman after all) is in a completely different stratosphere.

The cash on the Challenger tour (where most of these players toil) I would imagine barely covers their travel and accommodation expenses.

I have a big message for all these LTA failures - put away your Champagne and look for new jobs - I can tell you that won't be easy! Your time is up!
More excuses from the LTA as pathetic results really mean that these players are just not good enough to compete at this level and should not be at Wimbledon or any Grand Slam event.
Although Baltacha played well enough in the first round to scrape through, the familiar major weaknesses came back today against a lowly ranked opponent who she should have beaten. This just shows how shallow the LTA is as an organisation and how badly it has performed!

Arsene Wenger's taken the best part of a decade to generate a crop of local lads he thinks can break into the Arsenal First XI. That's because he had them from the beginning.

Luckily for him, he was allowed to import foreign talent for the seniors in the interim. The head of the LTA can't do that.

My opinion is that you need to keep people as normal as is consistent with being a successful professional whilst they are growing up; you need to make sure they don't train too hard until their bodies finish growing to minimise injury problems later on; and you need to instil technical proficiency, independent thinking, emotional understanding of self and acceptance of one's own character as the key planks PRIOR to embarking on a pro career.

Fitness you can add; strength you can add; hardened match play you can brush up on.

But characters and technique are formed as children and that's the key skills needed in junior nurturing.

There's no one right answer, only right and wrong answers for unique kids.

And if you are only interested in those who are 6ft at 14, you'll likely miss out on some genuine talent who'll be blown off court at 14 courtesy of being 5ft 3".....JPM was interested in winning at 18 not 14, he didn't do so bad, did he?

Girls looking better, is it the same with the boys? Media doesn't look at that often does it? I wouldn't know whether there are any good 16 year old boys right now........no need to build them up unnecessarily, but worth an annual look at it with calm analysis and pointers to key areas for growth.........

IMHO

"Although Baltacha played well enough in the first round to scrape through, the familiar major weaknesses came back today against a lowly ranked opponent who she should have beaten"

Baltacha's "lowly ranked opponent" was actually only four or five ranking positions lower than her own, so it was hardly an upset or shock result. Baltacha probably could have played better than she did and won it (and she has beaten Flipkens twice before), but didn't. I think some of the problem with not getting the results in the big tournaments is that there's just not enough experience of the occasion. Maybe it's a mental issue that should be addressed.

As for the "stop handing out wild cards" thing, it's a bit of a red herring. I don't imagine the results would have been any better had no British player not been given a wild card, except if you look at it as a percentage of players through to round two, as there would have been fewer there in the first place. Maybe it would be best for the players to go through qualifying, just to get some more match practice, but they tend to play tournaments leading up to Wimbledon anyway for that, and qualifying is at a different place, and an entirely different set-up, so probably not all that much to be gained in terms of "Wimbledon experience".

A final thought: I don't know why so many are so critical of British players not being good enough only after they fail to win their matches (of which all but two were against higher-ranked players). Surely a glance at the rankings would have told anyone that they aren't as good as Britain would like them to be?

Irrespective of how much is spent on whom and where (Murray didn't go through the LTA system, Henman had a court at home) unless you get a racquet into a 3-year old's hand, then they would have to be an extremely gifted and natural player to make a brilliant tennis player at a later stage.

How many parents play tennis? What have we got in this country, 4,000 tennis clubs, versus something like 20,000 in France? How many tennis courts in schools now? We had 6 at my school in the 70s, all gone now.

Then there is the view of club players. Those in their 30s, 40s, 50s want to play themselves, they don't want to give up court time for youngsters and they don't want poor players on either side of the net, on club nights. So how do you encourage children to come through?

I think things are improving; I've seen lots of school-children swinging tennis racquets in the last few months, so maybe the Rusedski/Henman/Murray run is having a beneficial effect. Rather than the odd flash coming through and winning Wimbledon/RG in the 70s and encouraging some youngsters to take up the game, maybe a sustained run of 1 or 2, very good players, over a couple of decades will keep tennis in the public eye long enough to get several thousand kids playing the game. Until that happens, we're never going to have 6 players make it through to the second week.

Or even digital television? Surely with al those channels, the Beeb could drag itself away from the overkill on football and horse-racing and the procession that passes for motor sports these days, to actually show some other tennis tournaments, outside of the 4 GS and DC.

the sad reality is british womens and mens tennis is a shambles andy murray apart we have nothing to show for it how the LTA can put on there hospitality and drink nice champagne beggers belief

My son is a dedicated, hard working and talented tennis player. He can pull off shots that other juniors wouldn't even dream of. He has a rocket of a (left-handed) serve and a bullet of a forehand. But at 14 he was physically and emotionally immature, refused to play the classic junior baseline "moonball" game and lost (and still does lose) matches with errors whilst making passers-by stop and watch. The LTA were not interested in becoming involved in his development, so we upped sticks and moved to Spain. I hope that one day he will be another example of how short-sighted the LTA are in only helping junior players who have already made their way up the ranks by grinding away and playing the consistency game; if they have no weapons they will never make it in the senior game. Consistency can be developed, talent cannot.

Can someone at the 91Èȱ¬ please explain why the 91Èȱ¬ publishes endless blog articles on things like: "LTA struggles to shrug off dismal GB display" yet when Andy Murray overtakes Raphael Nadal in the world rankings it merits zilch.....nada.....zero?!!

We've suffered endless months of 91Èȱ¬ tennis commentators breathlessly describing Nadal as the "unstoppable Spanish bull of world tennis", etc, ad nauseum.

Murray has got the "bull" by the horns yet the 91Èȱ¬ doesn't waste a moment of its precious time writing about it.

Rather begs the question: "Just what are the 91Èȱ¬ doing with all that lovely free taxpayer cash?!!"