Ali vs Frazier, with rackets for gloves

Posted on 29/11/2010

For the first time since that near-on five-hour Wimbledon classic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal waged war upon one another in London once again on Sunday, and for Daily Telegraph writer Ian Chadband, it’s just about as good as sport gets...

The greatest rivalries in sporting history have thrived on the highs and lows, the to’s and the fro’s, but they fade away when inevitability strikes.

So there were moments after the second set of yet another fabulous chapter of the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal saga here at the O2 Arena that it just felt that we might be witnessing the end of a thrilling duopoly and the advent of a Spanish monopoly.

We had been here before; Federer, the prince, forging ahead, offering shotmaking from the Gods, looking untouchable – “unplayable,” Nadal called his opening barrage – like the best there has ever been.

Then finding himself being pegged back inexorably by tennis’s relentless dementor, the most astonishing athlete his sport has witnessed, sucking away his confidence and belief.

When the Swiss tumbled during the second set, trying desperately to retrieve a net cord and rose groggily, it felt as if it could be the same old, same old. A seventh defeat in their last eight encounters seemed to be gnawing at Federer. Good grief, he was even sweating under the lights.

Then, magically, Federer awoke, inspired and driven by the champion’s heart we so often take for granted because he can make the game look so absurdly easy, while the dementor perceptibly began to be drained of the energy that propels his malevolent intent. Yes, Nadal was weary after his Saturday best. Yes, Nadal was human. Hold the back page!

When it dawned on Federer that his final looping forehand had actually dipped on to the line, he screamed to the Dome top. It was not a slam but it may have meant as much. It was the match he had to win. For his ego, his belief, perhaps even for his grand slam future.

He sounded re-energised. “I hope I can play for many more years to come,” he said. “I think it’s possible.”

Fantastic if it means countless new sequels in a duel which surely belongs up there alongside the likes of Coe-Ovett, Borg-McEnroe, Prost-Senna and Ali-Frazier. With one great difference, of course. There is not the same personal edge, from distaste to plain hostility, which characterised the others.

The theory is that if ‘hate sells’, Rafa v Roger just does not possess the ingredients of the tastiest sporting feuds. They’re just too damn nice, killing each other with politeness. So Rafa would never dream of making an excuse. “I don’t say I lost because I was tired,” he insisted. And as for rivalry, there was none, he shrugged. “We have a great relationship all the time, no?”

But isn’t that matiness actually what helps make it a completely refreshing rivalry for the ages? Cut out all of the hype and unnecessary posturing and manufactured animosity and just savour only the absolute competitive brilliance of two masters near the peak of their powers.
“We’re playing not only for ourselves but for history,” as Federer put it. “There will always be a lot at stake in all of our future matches, and I think it’s wonderful.”

The glitterati evidently thought so too, all wanting an ‘I was there’ moment, from royalty (Princess Beatrice) to Hollywood (Kevin Spacey) to rock ’n roll (Ronnie Wood) to politics (Boris Johnson) and, naturally, sport.

All just to witness just a few snapshots of the dazzling fare we saw in the match on a lawn across town two years ago. Two consecutive points in the sixth game of the opening set summed up the magnificence; two long rallies of high speed chess, fantastic retrieving, virtuoso shotmaking and amazing all-court athleticism.

Federer ended the first with a sublime, silky backhand winner and Nadal the next with a murderous forehand crusher. Ali versus Frazier, with rackets for gloves. Sport does not get much better.

Nadal is the best in all sport

Posted on 17/10/2010

Despite his shock defeat to Jurgen Melzer at the Shanghai Masters this week, the Observer's Kevin Mitchell still feels the time is right to crown Rafael Nadal as the world's greatest sportsman.

The strain of another tough if spectacularly successful season is starting to show on Rafael Nadal, just as he is reaching for the title of King of Sport. Nobody dominates his own discipline like Nadal, yet there is a price to pay for his near year-round commitment to a game that relies so heavily on his genius, and the levy in Shanghai last week was defeat by the Austrian Jürgen Melzer, a result that shocked all but those close to the peerless Spaniard.

Continue reading "Nadal is the best in all sport"

Who was worried about Nadal?

Posted on 04/07/2010

Two years after knocking Roger Federer off his Wimbledon throne, Rafael Nadal is back to his best and one match away from an eighth Grand Slam title. But after a year of struggle with injuries and off-court issues, the Spaniard is simply unstoppable, writes Mark Hodgkinson in The Sunday Telegraph.

For Middle England, Wimbledon's core constituency, worrying about the state of Rafael Nadal's knees is a bit like worrying about house prices: it never turns out to be quite as bad as you had imagined.

When did you fear most for Nadal? Was it when he summered "away from everything" last year, when his parents were having difficulties with their marriage and he could not play at Wimbledon because of his knees?

Or perhaps it was when he failed to win a set in his three round-robin matches last November at the end-of-season tournament on the Greenwich Peninsula?

Or maybe it was when he arrived on the French Riviera this April, for the tournament at the Monte Carlo Country Club, having not won a title for almost a year?

Or was it earlier in these Championships, when Nadal was concerned about his body? Nadal could confirm his dominance of men's tennis by beating Tomas Berdych, the son of a train driver and a grand slam final debutant, on Wimbledon's Centre Court.

For the first time since 2002, Roger Federer will not feature on the second Sunday of the Wimbledon fortnight, and Nadal has only previously lost in grand slam finals when he has played the Swiss on this lawn.

For the past three months, starting with that tournament on the Cote d'Azur, Nadal has been showing more teeth than Julia Roberts, performing his victory celebrations of biting into trophies, and now he is just three sets away from chewing on that golden Wimbledon cup again.

Nadal has won 30 of his last 31 matches, with his only defeat in that run coming against Feliciano Lopez in the quarter-finals of the pre-Wimbledon tournament at Queen's Club.

From Monaco to Roland Garros, Nadal played a perfect clay-court season, going undefeated, including regaining his French Open title, and this afternoon he could be presented with a second replica Wimbledon trophy to be lovingly placed on top of his television in Majorca.

Whatever happens on Sunday, Federer will on Monday morning be ranked outside the top two for the first time since 2003, and it will look as though Nadal, the world No 1, has every chance of finishing this season at the top of that list.

Continue reading "Who was worried about Nadal?"

Let's blame Beckham for Murray's loss

Posted on 03/07/2010

Andy Murray came up short in his quest to reach the Wimbledon final, as he was found wanting by world No. 1 Rafael Nadal. In truth there was little between the pair, but Nadal edged the vital moments. Not even David Beckham could inspire Murray and the Telegraph’s Jim White feels it was another instance of Brits proving they are the nearly men of tennis.

"At match point, with Andy Murray just seconds away from defeat in his second Wimbledon semi final in a row, someone in the Centre Court crowd articulated the precise cause of his exit.

“I blame David Beckham,” the heckler shouted. Beckham, the new cheerleader in chief of British sport, fresh from chivvying our footballers on to humiliation in South Africa, looked suitably sheepish as he sat in the stands. It was a funny intervention. And so much easier to blame the man who is rapidly becoming the nation’s sporting Jonah than it was to face the simple truth: when up against the very best, our collective hope once again fell short. Critically short.

In just over two hours twenty minutes, Murray lost in straight sets to Rafael Nadal, thus becoming the tenth British man to lose in the semis since Bunny Austin reached the 1938 final. We are good on this island at producing the nearly men of tennis. But if you want to know what the real thing looks like, he was wearing a white headband, calf length shorts and hit every ball yesterday as if it had personally insulted him.

“It’s not like I played badly,” said Murray afterwards, the disappointment catching in his throat. “It was just he played great.”

Murray was spot on in his analysis. His problems on Centre Court were not of his own making. Unlike the England football team at the World Cup, he approached the most important engagement of his career if not in the form of his life, then pretty close. There was little sign of nerves when he stepped out to a rousing ovation, no hint that the pressure of expectation was too great for him to bear. As he had throughout this tournament, he played well. His forehand was vicious, his lobs imaginative, his serve precise.

No, his problems were exclusively served up by the player on the other side of the net. Nadal did not become world number one, did not win seven grand slam titles, by having the backbone of a jellyfish. As was evidenced by his role in Wimbledon’s greatest ever match – that epic final in 2008 – this is not a man who gives up. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight it would require the severance of all his limbs for an opponent to gain advantage. And still he wouldn’t quit.

Rarely in sport are we witness to a force of will as great as that Nadal demonstrated yesterday. Take the second set. Murray had lost the first easily, unable to find the geometry in his shots to outwit the Spaniard. But for much of the second, it appeared momentum was ebbing the Scot’s way. As he won his service games to love, as he three times stretched Nadal to deuce on his serve, in the crowd you could feel the hope rising. Surely, at last, their time had come: they were about to witness history. But Nadal refused to be cowed. Time and again, he battled back from the edge. In the set’s tie break, Murray took the lead. He looked good. He looked on his way. But Nadal, pummelling the ball so hard you expected the cover to fly off at any second, insisted he would win it. And when the inevitable happened, when Nadal clinched the set to go two up, Murray hurled his racket to the ground. It was not an act of petulance. It was a moment of despair: what did he have to do to beat this man?"

Murray must go on the attack

Boris Becker is writing a column for the Daily Telegraph and he believes Murray must become more attack minded and also questioned the role of his coahes.

"Without doubt, falling just short at another grand slam is going to hit Andy Murray hard. Be it today or, if it is not too painful, when he watches the final from a sofa at home tomorrow, he will get the sinking feeling that comes with every big chance blown.

But Andy is not destined to always fall short. I really believe that he has a slam in him.

In truth, Murray played as well as he could have done yesterday. Tactically and strategically, it was his best match of the tournament.

Rafael Nadal was just as we expected he would be, running down every ball and putting Murray under incredible pressure, and for the most part, he handled it well. But the semi-finals of a slam revolve around a handful of points, and when they came, Andy hesitated.

Would the match have changed had he won the second set? Of course — his set point in the tie-breaker was the key moment. But it is an inescapable fact that a player reverts to instinct on the big points at the business end of a tournament like Wimbledon.

Unless you really believe that is the right way to play, when crunch time comes, you slip back to your old ways, and Murray’s gut feeling is still to play defensively.

For example, if he had put a big first serve in the corner, only for Nadal to rip a return past him, he would have had to hold up his hands, and say “too good”.

But he missed the first serve, played a tentative second, and retreated three feet behind the baseline. Just then, he let Nadal do the talking on the tennis court, and he was always going to lose that point. It was a classic example of lacking 100 per cent belief that attacking was the right way to go.

Nevertheless, Murray is on the right track, but his improvement over this tournament begs the question: why has it taken so long for him to adopt an aggressive mentality? Finally changing things around when he comes to the most important tournament of the year does not make sense. He should have been playing like this back in March. What have his coaching team been doing all this time?

Another concern I have is that someone in his group said on the eve of this semi-final that they were not worried about him being knocked out of Queen’s in the third round. They said it meant he could have a week of practice on court before Wimbledon started. That is the last thing you want to do. It is too late – everything has to be in place by then. That is a difference between players such as Nadal and Federer, and Murray.

It makes me wonder, therefore, whether he will be with the same coaching team next year. Andy is an ambitious young player, but he needs help. He needs someone in his corner that will take him to the next level, especially over the next phase, the hard court season."

Am I Isner or Mahut?

Posted on 01/07/2010

When watching John Isner and Nicolas Mahut slug each other into a standstill in the great marathon match of Wimbledon, the only thing that could have heightened the drama would have been mini-microphones allowing us to find out what each player was thinking. Well, Isner has since recounted his top 10 thoughts on the David Letterman show, and the Guardian have listed them for us...

10. I'm exhausted

9. We've been playing so long I've forgotten - am I Isner or Mahut?

8. Remember when I said I was exhausted? That was eight hours ago!

7. Wonder if I'll be sore tomorrow

6. I'm gonna lay back until 51-50, then make my move

5. I'm asleep

4. Why couldn't I have played Federer?

3. Cramp!

2. Honestly, I don't care if I win or lose, I just don't want to die

1. Larry King has had marriages that didn't last this long

Five weeks and counting

Posted on 16/04/2010

Andy Murray's dismal performance against Philipp Kohlschreiber was his third straight defeat, and Kevin Mitchell in The Guardian assesses the inexplicable slump in fortunes of the British No. 1.

Monte Carlo, like any gambling resort, is not a place for certainties. It is a paradise of contradictions, too, wearing a patina of glamour but, underneath, a bit frayed around the stitching.

Andy Murray, not one of life's natural gamblers, saw through its charms on Wednesday, when he was dumped out of the singles at the Masters Series event here, with the billionaires at the champagne-heavy tables on the terrace above whistling their derision upon him on Court Central like so many sans-culottes.

The wild card Murray's grateful hosts had given him for what he imagined would be a week's gentle rehab on the Riviera turned out to be a P60.

Ejected from the red dirt after a mere three-and-a-half hours' tennis, he has only five weeks left in which to find some form before the French Open. It will not be easy. In fact it could wreck his summer, this wretched run that stretches back to the third set that January night in Melbourne when Roger Federer brought tears to his eyes in the Australian Open final.

Continue reading "Five weeks and counting"

Why has it all gone wrong for Andy Murray?

Posted on 29/03/2010

Andy Murray is a puzzling individual. Just when you think he is ready to finally make an assault on tennis’s established order, he retires into his grumpy, brooding shell, losing to the likes of Mardy Fish in Miami. Neil Harman, writing for the Times, has taken a look into Murray’s decline over recent months, and he charts the Scot’s demise back to his Australian Open final defeat to Roger Federer...

A small voice in the crowd at the Sony Ericsson Open cried out “C’mon Andy, you’re my hero”. Even if Andy Murray had heard the exhortation, it is doubtful he could have pulled himself out of the faraway mood he has been in here. But the British No 1 is going to have to do just that, very soon.

At this stage last year, Murray had built upon his last-16 appearance in Melbourne by winning in Rotterdam, reaching the quarter-finals in Dubai, the final in Indian Wells and he played exceptionally to win this event, sweeping aside Novak Djokovic in the final.

In Australia this year, he could not have been more content. How can he put things back together again?

Continue reading "Why has it all gone wrong for Andy Murray?"

Time to start afresh

Posted on 26/03/2010

The fallout from Britain's Davis Cup defeat to Lithuania rolls on, and Neil Harman in the The Times believes that the only way to kick-start British tennis is to start completely afresh.

The integral parts of the British game were scattered far and wide this week as Roger Draper attempted to explain to MPs why — after Davis Cup humiliation in Lithuania — the LTA is still worth £27 million of taxpayers’ cash.

As the LTA chief executive gave his account in Westminster to the All-Party Parliamentary Tennis Group, the main bloc of male players were in Jersey, where they were almost outnumbered by the seven coaches deemed necessary for the ATP Tour Challenger event.

Farther west in Florida, Andy Murray was the lone British male in the draw for the Sony Ericsson Open, where he was joined by three female players, including Heather Watson, 17, who was granted a wild card. And way out west on a golf course in California the brothers Lloyd dwelt on the events that led John to quit as Davis Cup captain.

Big brother David ought to have been in charge of the sport in Britain long ago — he still should and is as motivated as ever to do the job. John resigned having secured a £150,000-plus payoff and so became the latest LTA employee to be hastened from his post.

Continue reading "Time to start afresh"

To be chief for one day

Posted on 10/03/2010

Britain's defeat to Lithuania in the Davis Cup will almost certainly cost captain John Lloyd his job, but that will not solve the much more serious problems that have turned one of the world's most expensively run programmes into a laughing stock, says Neil Harman in The Times. Harman outlines his rescue plan for British tennis.

The Roehampton renaissance building in southwest London is a £40 million cradle of elitism, too opulent and cosy and not fit for purpose. It is everything that the sport has no right to think that it is. There are six indoor courts and more than 60 people staring into computers. There are not enough players of sufficient quality to make the figures stack up.

When Judy Murray said that, rather than building one £40 million centre, the LTA should have funded forty £1 million centres across the country, she was spot on.

Continue reading "To be chief for one day"

Rusedski and Henman not the answer

Posted on 09/03/2010

Following Britain's ignominious defeat to Lithuania in the Davis Cup, there is broad agreement that there must be structural changes to the way tennis is coached on these shores. With head coach John Lloyd considering his position, former Davis Cup players Greg Rusedski and Tim Henman have been mooted as potential replacements. Kevin Garside, chief sports writer in the Telegraph, is not enthused by the prospect of either of those men replacing Lloyd should he leave.

There is no coaching crisis. Great Britain lost in Lithuania as a result of a structural flaw that runs through the game. The inquiry into this latest embarrassment, promised by the Lawn Tennis Association chief executive, Roger Draper, is a recurring lament, a howl at the moon.

Continue reading "Rusedski and Henman not the answer"

A tea and biscuit budget for the LTA

Posted on 05/03/2010

As Great Britain attempt to avoid a fifth straight Davis Cup defeat, Mark Hodgkinson in The Telegraph looks at the vast gulf between the nation who hosts Wimbledon and their opponents Lithuania.

The facility is named after an American player and libertine of Lithuanian ancestry who drove a yellow convertible Rolls-Royce, partied at New York's Studio 54, snorted cocaine and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

For John Lloyd, Great Britain's Davis Cup captain, one of his happiest memories of Gerulaitis was the time when they left Studio 54 together at four or five in the morning, when the sun was coming up over Manhattan, and they drove away in that convertible with the top down and the girls screaming.

And yet this weekend could bring about an unfortunate link between Lloyd and Gerulaitis, if events go against the Briton at a centre filled with photographs of Vitas, plus a pair of his old shorts, a shirt and a graphite racket.

If Britain lose this tie in Group Two of the Euro-African Zone, the third division of the competition, it will be Lloyd's fifth successive defeat, and he understands that might mean "my time could be up".

It would also put Britain into a relegation play-off against Ireland or Turkey the weekend after Wimbledon, and if they lose that too, they would be as low as you could go in the Davis Cup, down with tennis superpowers such as Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Malta, Moldova and San Marino.

Since Tim Henman retired in 2007, Lloyd's team have failed to win a tie, but this could be the excruciating weekend when Britain, a grand slam nation and one of the founders of the Davis Cup, starts to disappear off the tennis map.

Those who follow tennis only from their sofas for two weeks of the year are wondering how a nation that stages the Wimbledon Championships, whose governing body has an annual budget in excess of £30 million, could find itself playing and possibly losing against a country such as Lithuania, whose tennis federation has to get by on around £90,000 a year.

This is a moment to consider the fact that Britain's Lawn Tennis Association spent around half a million last year on free lunches for its players, coaches, visitors and administrators at the national tennis centre in London: the Lithuanians would probably struggle to cover the LTA's bill for tea and digestives.

And yet there is a horrible possibility that Britain could lose this tie, as, in the absence of Andy Murray, who decided to sit it out, this is the most inexperienced British team in history.

Not one of the British players has won a Davis Cup rubber, and only doubles player Colin Fleming has won a set. Singles player James Ward and doubles specialist Ken Skupski will be making their first appearances.

Britain will not even have the highest ranked player at the indoor hard court. That will be Ricardas Berankis, who was the junior world No 1, who won the boys' title at the 2007 US Open, and who broke into the top 200 of the men's game after last month reaching the quarter-finals of a tournament in San Jose in California.

Continue reading "A tea and biscuit budget for the LTA"

Peer hoping to build bridges

Posted on 13/02/2010

Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer will be in the spotlight at the upcoming Dubai Tennis Championships, after being excluded from the event 12 months ago after the UAE refused to grant her a visa. She will be in the field this year and in an interview with the Independent’s Paul Newman, claims she hopes her appearance can ease political tensions.

Sport should be outside of politics, so obviously I want to go and play there. I think we all need to be equal. It hurt mentally and professionally, because I was playing very well. I was on a good run and I was ready for the tournament. It was a big tournament and I couldn't go, so it really stopped my momentum. To be barred from a country is not a nice feeling. I think there's no place for that in sport. I actually think that sport can make it better and help political situations, not make it worse.

Terry is good company
A lot of negative press coverage has come John Terry’s way in recent weeks. He gave an interview to the Times’ Mark Crampton shortly before the revelations about his private life came out and it seems he made a positive impression.

Over the years I have interviewed a fair few footballers. Some (Ryan Giggs) I’ve liked, some (Ruud Gullit, Alan Shearer) I have disliked, and some (Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, Robbie Fowler, Andrew Cole) I’ve been fairly neutral about. Needless to say, taken together, they are not symptomatic of anything much; they’re just young men good at doing one thing.

Next to Giggs, Terry was probably the best company of the bunch. It’s worth saying that, unlike some of the footballers I ended up, after protracted negotiations, not interviewing, Terry didn’t demand payment for his time.

A good deal of Terry’s likeability came from his observance of the rules of simple human decency, an observance not always honoured, when we met, by some of the men listed above, some of whom gave every impression they did not care whether this latest intrusion into their cosseted existence lived or died. Terry, by contrast, shook hands, listened, gave me my agreed time (an hour), was solicitous of the various other people hanging around.

Federer cements his place as the greatest

Posted on 01/02/2010

Andy Murray edged closer to his first Grand Slam title, but once again Roger Federer proved too good. The Swiss made it Grand Slam title No. 16 with his victory in the Australian Open and James Lawton in the Independent is on a different level to any other sportsman.

The great champions, men like Muhammad Ali and Jack Nicklaus, have always shared an ability to reach down and find again qualities that the world believed lost forever. But it is not often they do what Roger Federer did in Melbourne. They do not re-make themselves quite so remarkably. They tend to fall short of re-incarnation. Federer did not. Astonishingly when you think of all that he has achieved, in both victory and defeat, Federer's latest gift to the sport he has dominated so profoundly, so beautifully for so long carried more than anything the element of surprise.

At the age of 28 he has surely done more than stretch out further the target facing anyone who in the future makes the improbable assertion that he has the means to be the greatest tennis player of all time. He has done nothing less than consolidate his claims as the supreme phenomenon of modern sport.

Federer is someone whose consistent hold on such imperatives as fitness – a great, often ignored attribute, we were reminded as his 22-year-old opponent showed clear signs of physical stress in a near heart-stopping third set and tiebreaker – relentless practice and unswerving dedication to the avoidance of any distraction has outstripped all opposition not just in tennis but any sports discipline you care to mention.

There was a time when his level of performance was inextricably linked with the deeds of his now embattled friend Tiger Woods. But for the moment at least such comparisons are not so much remote as savage.

There, in Melbourne, was Federer, the ultimate sportsman, the adoring father and the devoted husband. And somewhere shielded from the gaze of a judgmental world was the Tiger, engaged in of all things, we are told, a battle against an addiction to casual sex. No-one should easily dismiss the capacity of Woods to re-generate the splendour of his golf, or reproduce the mental toughness that once enabled him to share the peaks of sport with the man with whom he regularly exchanged text messages of mutual congratulation. But then it would also be idle not to believe their current situations might be residing on separate planets.

Away from the tennis, John Terry is front and back-page news. He scored the winner for Chelsea at Burnley, having had to contend with talk in the press about his private life. It’s quickly been dubbed Terrygate and there have been calls for him to quit as England captain. Sam Wallace in the Independent is convinced that what is best for the national team should be the only consideration.

As the pressure grows on Terry and every question in every Fabio Capello press conference relates to the scandal, and the World Cup draws closer, so the stakes are raised. Does Capello take the Campbell approach and decide that a sacrifice is needed so that everyone can move on? Because right now, Terrygate has pitched its tents on every front page and is refusing to budge. This is not the place for a debate on the attitudes of the British media towards a story of this nature. It is enough to say that Terry knew the territory when he got the job and while he was not obliged to be blameless in his life, he did have a responsibility not to drag the England team and its manager into these kind of episodes.

Move over Mr Murray, Bally's in town

Posted on 21/01/2010

Andy Murray is in danger of losing his dominance of the Australian Open headlines to a fellow Brit. Her name is Elena Baltacha and in knocking out No.30 seed Kateryna Bondarenko she is doing her best to put the women’s game back on the map. Dinari Safina lies in wait in round three and Baltacha could well go down with a whimper, but for the moment let her revel in the spotlight. Neil Harman of the Times has taken a look into Baltacha’s routine and there is a secret weapon in her camp.

Elena Baltacha does not have a coach in the accepted sense of the word. Nino Severino describes himself as a “project manager” and the aspiration is to make the utmost of what is left of the 26-year-old’s career that has had more stops and starts than the lights at the top of Regent Street. So far, in this Australian Open, the two British No 1s have forfeited a single set in four matches. Andy Murray completed his second straight-sets victory, a 6-1, 6-4, 6-3 cruise against Marc Gicquel, which means that he will meet Florent Serra, another Frenchman, in the third round and, quite possibly, a third in succession, Gaël Monfils, in the last 16. Baltacha’s 6-2, 7-5 thumping of Kateryna Bondarenko, the No 30 seed from Ukraine, leaves her with the fascinating prospect of a duel with Dinara Safina, the world No 2 from Russia, to come next. Baltacha should not reflect too long on the last time Safina met a British No 1 in a grand-slam tournament, last year’s French Open, when Anne Keothavong was dispatched without a game to her name.

Nino Severino is the man driving Baltacha on and he has made it clear that distractions will not be tolerated.

It’s about doing what we can to secure the future for Bally, putting down realistic expectations and keeping her away from people who might mess with her mind because we don’t have all that much time to play with from her career standpoint. She’s not 16, after all. I vet people very close to her, to make sure that she only hears the right things. Just recently I had to ask someone who had been working with her not to come back again; he was becoming too disruptive. We are very careful the way we manage everything around her.

Murray's (small) team catch the eye

Posted on 19/01/2010

Andy Murray made serene progress on day one of the Australian Open, raising hope that he can end Britain’s Grand Slam drought. He claims his focus is on his tennis rather than off-field distractions and Paul Newman in the Independent picked up on the slimmed-down nature of Murray’s entourage.

There have been times when Andy Murray's courtside entourage would have done justice to an American football team. When he grew tired of spending day after day in the company of the garrulous Brad Gilbert, the Scot replaced his coach with a private army of assistants, ranging from physical trainers to friends who doubled up as hitting partners.

There were still seven people in Murray's box here yesterday during his 6-1, 6-1, 6-2 victory over South Africa's Kevin Anderson on the opening day of the Australian Open, but they included his mother and her partner and two representatives of his management company. Team Murray was down to Miles Maclagan, his coach, Jez Green, one of his trainers, and Andy Ireland, his physiotherapist.

While people like Alex Corretja, who has played an increasingly important role as a coach, and Matt Little, another member of his fitness staff, will remain part of Murray's entourage, the 22-year-old Scot plans to travel lighter this year.

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.