Filed under: Tennis, Wimbledon
It's that time of the season again, you can tell by the lashing rain. Time for Wimbledon. And time to once again dream the impossible dream. Could this be the year? Finally? After all that interminable waiting? Could this be the year that British tennis fans finally decide what it is they actually want?Back in the early 1990s, the British tennis scene had to make do with Jeremy Bates. He'd occasionally win two or three matches at The Championships, scraping into the start of the second week. This was seen as a major achievement, and an excuse for a patriotic carnival. Harbouring no expectations whatsoever - British tennis was in a particularly sorry state at the time - the masses at SW19 whooped and hollered as their man ground out victories against the odds, thanks to a nervous serve and volley game that always looked in danger of crumbling to dust at any given moment, before invariably losing to Guy Forget in the fourth round.
It was bonus entertainment. Bates was never going to win Wimbledon, but the ride was fun while it lasted. Once the inevitable occurred, and Bates was sent packing, attention switched from the sideshow to the main event, and seeing what Boris Becker, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Goran Ivanisevic et al were up to.
Not that everyone was totally content, of course. Questions would be asked, loud and long, as to why Britain couldn't muster a contender for the men's title. Just the one. Was it really beyond the wit of the British tennis establishment to produce a single player the country could rally around and pin their hopes on?
So along came Tim Henman. A polite middle-class chap from Oxford, Henman is a national treasure now he's retired, but it's easy to forget how often he was mocked in his playing days for being, well, a polite middle-class chap from Oxford. With a style easy on the eye, Henman was the best thing British men's tennis had thrown up since the 1970s heyday of John Lloyd, another nearly man. Henman reached six grand-slam semi-finals: one at the French Open, once at the US Open, and four times, famously, at Wimbledon.
The Wimbledon crowd invested their hopes in him, but deep down they knew he didn't quite have the right stuff to make it to a final. Henman was cheered to the rafters whenever he was on Centre Court, but after witnessing Sampras or Ivanisevic whistle serve after serve past the British number one's lugs, the country would scuttle off and titter behind his back. Mainly at that fistpump, a mannered prod of the air, a sop to those who demanded he show more grit and guts. Henman's problem, it was routinely argued, wasn't that he didn't have a big enough serve to regularly trouble the top players; it was that he never showed enough passion. That old British sporting trope. Never mind that he'd done what fans in the Bates era had demanded, taking a generation of British tennis fans to places they'd never before been.
In 1997, Greg Rusedski reached the final of the US Open, but he was too Canadian and therefore didn't count.
And so to Andy Murray, Britain's most realistic hope of a gentlemen's grand slam title since the days of Fred Perry (who, revealingly, quickly upped sticks and became a naturalised US citizen, but that's another story). Murray is an outstanding player, capable of mixing it with Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, albeit not on a regular basis, and certainly not in the finals of slams. Even so, reaching those three grand-slam finals - a US Open and two Australian Opens - is unprecedented behaviour for a male British tennis player in the modern era. And while it's yet to be seen if he can convert his supreme talent into a grand-slam prize - not quite top drawer but near as dammit, and by some distance the best of the rest - he's the player on the circuit who offers the most bang for one's buck: rollercoaster entertainment, snapshots of extreme brilliance; wildly erratic, passionate and emotional, an enigma.
Which is, needless to say, not good enough for this country's tennis fans either. Murray is too passionate, it's argued, the anti-Henman; too much moaning, shouting and swearing, not enough smiling. One of those little fistpumps would suffice, Andy, no need to scream to the gods. Trawl the newspaper comment boards, and it won't take long to find somebody wishing he crashes and burns in the most strident and aggressive manner. Any excuse: it's apparently a problem that his mum watches his every game; nobody seemed to have a problem with Mr and Mrs Henman Snr looking down on their son from the stand. God knows what would happen to Murray if, like Henman, he was ever disqualified from Wimbledon for throwing a tantrum and accidentally whacking a ball against a ballgirl's head. He'd be chased back to Dunblane by a stick-wielding mob.
In the context of British men's tennis, and the laughable state of it over the last 70 years or so, Murray should already be a national hero. A major cause of his relative unpopularity, one suspects, is that he's from Scotland, and once had the audacity to make a flippant joke about wanting the England football team to lose - in response to heckling from Henman about Scotland's non-participation in the 2006 World Cup, it should be remembered. Innocent banter, in other words. Yet the affair's hung over him ever since. Fans are within their rights to dislike Murray as much as they want, but if they've been erroneously offended as a result of this incident, they should at least have the decency to admit their pique is a result of their own anti-Scottish prejudice; falsely attributing an anti-Englishness to Murray and using it as an excuse to gleefully throw some abuse back is unfair on the player in the extreme, and poor form.
(Incidentally, it's never been satisfactorily explained exactly why Murray shouldn't want England to lose at football. It's the nature of sporting rivalry, after all. Consider: if Murray was of, say, West Indian descent, and his stated preference of the West Indies over England in a Test series was roundly criticised to the point that he'd be forced to make a craven apology, we'd be on very dodgy ground indeed.)
God knows what the tennis set will find to moan about next if Murray ever goes on to actually win this thing. He'll raise the trophy above his head at too jaunty an angle, showing disrespect to Queen and country, you wait and see.
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2011/06/23/tennis-wimbledon-andy-murray/
Fernando Verdasco Filippo Inzaghi Florent Malouda Francesco Totti Frank Lampard
No comments:
Post a Comment