Team Robson have a plan

Posted on 11/01/2010

Laura Robson is making her way up the tennis ladder and emerged from the Hopman Cup with her reputation enhanced. She lost all her singles matches en-route to the final, but hit form against Spain with a stunning win over world No.26 Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez. Team Robson are in no rush to thrust the 15-year-old on to the Tour, but Laura’s mother Kathy clearly has a plan in mind for her daughter as she told the Times.

Laura is a fantastic sportswoman who will only get better if everybody gives her the space to get better and be kind to her. She needs to grow into a woman, she is already 5ft 10½in and has had a little bit of a spurt, so 5ft 11in looks about where she will finish. Fitness is paramount to Laura’s wellbeing and development.

It would appear that Robson will use the best available facilities, whether that be in England under the guise of the LTA or over the Channel in France, as her mother has revealed.

We are using the Mouratoglou Academy in Paris for parts of the year because there are three French physical trainers there we absolutely love, especially one of them who comes from a tennis background and knows exactly where he wants to go with Laura.
Of course, we will use the NTC [the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, southwest London], we have a relationship there. Last year when we were practising on a court next to Andy Roddick, a group of kids came rushing over shouting ‘Laura, Laura’, and Andy, quick as a flash, said, 'Who is she?' And that’s right. Andy Roddick is a hero, Laura is still just a junior player. When she goes to France, she is no one, she trains with other players as part of a great group and she knows how much she needs to improve to match these girls.

The events in Angola where the Togo squad were ambushed and shot at by militants have led to suggestions that the upcoming World Cup could also be targeted by terrorists. Officials from South Africa have played down links with what happened in Angola happening again this summer, but Paul Hayward in the Guardian feels it would be folly to be so dismissive.

With indecent haste, Togo's footballers might feel, the thoughts of richer nations swung quickly from sympathy for the three killed and the others wounded on the bus carrying them to the implications for the global gathering further south, where there is no separatist or terrorist organisation for the authorities to fear but plenty of potential for imported threat. According to the head of South Africa's 2010 World Cup organising committee, Danny Jordaan, those "implications" are no more valid than a bomb going off in Spain would be to a World Cup in England. Geographically this may be true but Jordaan invites us to ignore the reality that this kind of opportunistic violence is now portable. It gets on planes and comes in by land and sea. It follows its targets across frontiers.