Finally Britain’s largest sports network news channel Sky Sports News spoke out yesterday about the woeful state of British tennis.In a series of their Monday night in depth sport features they focused on the issue which has in fact been rumbling for years but it is only now that the numbers are really beginning to stack up against the Lawn Tennis Association as Britain continues to fail.
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The problem for me though is why now? This type of feature should have been broadcasted shortly before or during Wimbledon, when the British public become ten times more interested in the sport.
Now, when the programme has controversially switched from freeview to the paid digital customer is the issue being highlighted.
Despite that it was a thoroughly interesting 22 minute feature, where presenter Clare Tomlinson was accompanied by Andy Murray’s former coach Miles Maclagan and former Davis Cup captain David Lloyd.
The feature focused on many areas including the next generation, local clubs, a look at a LTA funded centre and also provided us with interesting sound bites from a number of faces within the game, some more opinionated than others.
The two that obviously stood out for me were David Lloyd and Mark Petchey, both of whom for a long time have been the true voices of the game.
Hard hitting but factual, their views brought to light what has been wrong with the countries game for so many years.
As Petchey pointed out the LTA has used up 42% of its annual budget of £60 million on the elite of the game and with only Andy Murray at the top with the rest hovering between 200 and 500 in the world, it has been money well and truly wasted.
Lloyd backs this up by suggesting that the LTA should not monopolies tennis talent and nurture them into their type of player and instead the talent should be picked out and put into independent squads.
The decreasing number of public courts was also pointed out, which again has been down to the governing bodies inadequacies with funding.
Miles Maclagan also offered some interesting points and tried to take the attention away from the LTA by saying it is a more of a countrywide problem. He suggests that the councils need to be doing a lot more to maintain the conditioning of courts because even in poorer Eastern European counties they still manage to have access to thousands of clean courts.
Murray’s former coach also indicated that the country needs to build a base of good professional, players ranked from 30 to 80 in the world and not focus on making ‘special’ players like Andy Murray’s. He suggests this is down to coaches looking too technical too early and not allowing them to have fun and play.
This is what Lloyd, who is an owner of a business of sport and leisure centres which are spread throughout the county, believes is the root of the problem. He believes there needs to be separate youth programmes away from the LTA’s rigid system and fundamentally better quality coaches within the game.
The resounding result to come out of the special programme is the failings of the LTA, specifically the terrible reign of Chief Executive Roger Draper, a man who came in with big plans and in the end has not reached any of them and has in fact made things worse.
Petchey and Lloyd are 100 per cent adamant the he and a number of his colleagues should hold their hands up and leave.
The former Davis Cup captain said: “If you run a business and you are in the job for four and a half years, miss targets, miss budgets, nothing seems to be improving, he has had his chance and I think he has to go.”
One thing I did notice and hopefully the rest of you noticed was the lack of appearance of Draper to stand up and pledge his case.
I am sure when the Sky Sports reporter Geraint Jones went down to the National Tennis Centre he was around to speak to but obviously he prefers to stay quiet, which in my eyes is a sign of a guilt-ridden man.
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