The tennis players who can’t be bothered to win
If there’s one thing we expect of athletes, it’s that they will always try their hardest, said Claire Cohen in The Daily Telegraph. But at Wimbledon last week, two players made a mockery of that expectation. Nick Kyrgios, the mercurial 24-year-old Australian, decided to spend the night before his second-round tie against Rafael
Nadal in the pub. Then, in the match itself, he seemed so unconcerned about winning that he twice served underarm; he also tried to hit Nadal by firing a shot at his chest. If anything, the behaviour of Kyrgios’s fellow Australian, Bernard Tomic, was even more appalling. He put in so little effort in his firstround defeat that he was fined £45,000. After a “similarly lacklustre” defeat at Wimbledon two years ago, he complained that he had been “bored”. Well, if players like Kyrgios and Tomic can’t be bothered to play properly, Wimbledon should ban them from playing at all.
Let us not rush to judgement, said James Gheerbrant in The Times. Tomic only lost the final set 6-4, so he can’t have given up completely. And Kyrgios’s underarm serves were intended to give him “the best possible chance of winning” – the first one caught Nadal completely off guard. Besides, tennis, with its countless bland personalities, desperately needs daring players like Kyrgios “to disregard its boundaries”. The alternative – “absolute deference at all times” – is the enemy of what sport should be.