Britain must invest in youth and end wild-card madness
The LTA should change its policy to give hungry youngsters such as Jay Clarke a chance at SW19 rather than subsidising a string of perennial no-hopers
There is nothing quite like the Queen’s Speech, with parps of ceremonial trumpet and genuflecting peers dressed for a Santa Claus convention, to show up our endearing absurdity as a country. This week, it happened to coincide with the release of the Wimbledon wild cards, one of the few sporting rituals that could rival the badinage between Black Rod and Dennis Skinner for quaint illogicality. Every year it is the same, the proffering of sacrificial British lambs for first-round slaughter. It is tennis’s answer to picking out a few clapped-out bangers for a demolition derby.
Britain’s record with wild cards at the All England Club is lamentable. Across the other grand-slam tournaments in France, the United States and Australia, the success of home-grown players converting wild cards into match wins hovers around 30 per cent. At Wimbledon, it is 13 per cent.
Since 2010, the record of our wild-card recipients – to be rewarded this year with £35,000 each for an opening-round defeat – reads: won seven, lost 46. Nothing stands as starker testament to the age-old weakness in British tennis for subsidising mediocrity.
This year, the wild-card committee has seen fit to dole out another to James Ward, his eighth. It equals the number given to perennial whipping boy Alex Bogdanovic, who lost eight first-round matches in a row from 2002 to 2009 and then had the gall to complain that the Lawn Tennis Association was cutting his funding.
Ward, to give him his due, has shown greater spirit and application than ‘Boggo’ ever did. The son of a Euston cab driver, he has pursued his dream with a vigour that should dissuade us from viewing his Wimbledon struggles in isolation. Days after departing SW19, he would usually be found grafting for pennies at some tinpot Challenger in Quebec.
But there the charity ends. For too long, the goodwill gesture of a wild card has not been repaid, while the standards for awarding one have slipped. In 2015, the LTA, desperate to advance beyond the likes of Bogdanovic, brought in rules against using a wild card as a soft option. Beyond emphasising such intangibles as attitude and professionalism, the governing body required that an eligible player should be ranked in the top 250 and have shown strong recent form.
Well, Ward is the world No1,062 and has won four sets of competitive tennis in a year. And yet the insiders’ argument is that he still deserves one: “Top lad, Wardy, proper grafter, cut him some slack.” The cold reality is that, in 2017, he has done nothing to justify being swept into the main draw of our greatest tournament. The sole mitigation raised is his sterling Davis Cup service for Britain. But of what relevance is that he beat John Isner, on a Glasgow indoor court two years ago, to his chances against the best in the world on grass in 10 days.
It is time to stop this madness. Ward, to put it bluntly, has had his moment. He is 30, has suffered serious knee problems and is likely to be contemplating his life beyond tennis soon. His most recent result was a 6-2, 6-2 pasting at Queen’s this week by 35-year-old Julien Benneteau. At Wimbledon, it seems, it is good enough simply to be a recognised part of the furniture, even if you lack a cat in The cupboard is bare. A major factor is that tennis in Britain is enslaved by a ‘jobs for the boys’ culture. In these halcyon days, with a world No 1 to call our own, there is no coherent strategy for expanding the sport beyond a stolidly middle-class, two-weeksa-year niche into a wider enterprise that attracts children irrespective of money or background.
The LTA, sequestered in Roehampton, leafy south-west London, has failed to grasp how to widen the demographic. The comedian Tony Hawks hit upon a wonderful idea with his Tennis for Free campaign, filling some of Britain’s forsaken park courts with volunteer coaches, but has been let down by successive LTA regimes.
Even in the borough of Elmbridge, Surrey, which Murray calls home, a petition has been launched this week against the council charging £5 an hour for a court to raise revenues. It is a symptom, much like Wimbledon’s unimaginative wild-card choices, of a wider malaise, where British tennis could soon pay a heavy cost for years of closed-shop thinking.