The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Wimbledon cancellation could help Andy Murray. Breaking the Ice
The last few weeks have given us all perspective about the most important things in life.
But that doesn’t mean we need to feel guilty or embarrassed about how much we’re missing sport and how badly we want it to be back quicker than is being predicted.
It doesn’t make you any less concerned about the coronavirus pandemic if you say that no sport being played or watched has left a huge void that can’t be filled.
That’s why, even though we all knew it would happen, the cancellation of Wimbledon is really sad.
It’s one of the few major sporting events that is still on free-to-air TV and, unless you hate tennis, it captivates millions of us for a fortnight.
And there was the hope of Andy Murray being back this year as well.
We’ve all lost count of how many times he has brought the country together to watch his big games through our fingers!
From Andy’s point of view, though, this might not be the worst news.
Yes, he’ll be 34 by the time the Wimbledon next comes around but the cancellation has taken away any need for him to rush his latest comeback.
It’s such a huge event for him that it would have been hard for him to not do that this year.
There’s also the fact that the longer the sporting shutdown goes on, the more the players who have been regulars on tour will lose their physical advantages over him.
Everybody will be trying to regain match sharpness to varying degrees when the tennis season resumes.
I do think that it means we’ve seen the last of Roger Federer as a Grand Slam contender, however.
Wimbledon had become his only realistic hope of winning one of the big four and he was increasingly building his schedule around it.
He’ll be nearly 40 in the summer of 2021 and by that time, let’s hope he is still fit and healthy enough to play.
Even if he doesn’t have a shot at winning it would be cruel for Federer’s Centre Court career to end any other way than with him holding his racket above his head and a packed crowd cheering him off.
Non-cancellation surprise
It was a bit of a surprise that the R&A have decided not to go down the cancellation route for now.
Every other major sporting event scheduled for the summer seems to have bitten the dust but The Open is still standing.
In their statement, the R&A didn’t even mention the possibility, highlighting only postponement as an option that was under consideration.
Going by all the projections about the coronavirus that I’ve seen, I think they’re kidding themselves.
I just don’t see it happening.
In one sense, you can see why the R&A are reluctant to give up on going to Royal St George’s.
It’s different to Wimbledon, for example, because every year a new minivillage of infrastructure needs to be built at the venue. A lot of the big work will already have been done.