Tom Tebbutt weighs in on the upcoming changes to the ATP and WTA tour.
Reading the ATP summary makes me actually glad I follow the WTA more. I have no idea what all those proposals mean and why the tour finds them necessary. Putting shit on the nets??? I saw them experiment with this at Indian Wells during a practice session with Fed and Rafa and it was the most distractingly ugly thing ever.
Interesting proposal for an alternative to on court coaching:
Having been around tennis for many years, it strikes me that there is a better option if the WTA Tour is so insistent about getting this additional access to the players. Instead of the whole rigaramole of coaches going out onto the court, why not simply slip a headset on the player winning the set and have her talk directly to the television commentators doing the match. This may seem intrusive to some - but who would have believed 10 years ago that players would now be doing interviews on their way out to play the final of Wimbledon, as well as before many other important matches during the year?
That is now commonplace and players have become increasingly aware of the need to give more of themselves for the greater good of the sport. There is a two-minute break at the end of a set – why not just have the winner (the loser is usually of no mind to talk) just answer a couple of basic questions about how they feel, the match, playing conditions, etc. etc. It seems to me that an end-of-set interview might even be easier for a player than having to do one right before going on court when she is probably feeling her most nervous and incommunicative, trying to get into the right head space for the match.
The quick on-court interview would do away with the charade of a coach traipsing out onto the court, avoid the invasion of the privileged conversations between coach and player, maintain the tradition of players having to coach themselves on the court and, most of the time, assure that the language used for the conversation (generally English) would be understood by television viewers.
Meh. I'd rather watch an inconsolable Bepa crying under a towel or Dina/Zeljko googly eyes than a trite non-substantive interview.
