Random Jottings

Well, it's all over now

Another fortnight of tennis played on the green lawns of Wimbledon, SW19 is now over and I am not sure that it can be classified as a vintage year.  No great tennis, no huge peaks of wonderfulness this year, but there have been upsets along the way.   Here are my thoughts which I am sure you are all breathlessly awaiting...

First up - the ladies tournament.  I am sure I am going to outrage a lot of people here, but I am sorry I totally disagree with the equal prize money paid to the Ladies Champion.   The disparity between the male and female game has always been obvious but the Wimbledon Committee bowed to the hollering and shouting of Mesdames King, Casals, Navratilova et al back in the 70's and 80s and decided they deserved the same pay as the men. I disagreed then and I disagree now.  Most of the ladies tennis matches have been lacklustre and pedestrian and SHORT.  Oh yes we have had some goodies, not that many but some (Bartoli v Lisicki being an example) though these have been few and far between.   I am all for equal pay for an equal job but tennis is not a good example.

Watching the grunting Williams sisters is not exactly an aesthetic pleasure and their ungraciousness and consciousness that they are The Best and everyone else is lower than the dust beneath their chariot wheels, grates.   Serena put in a complaint that she and Venus were not on the main courts enough and that she found pushing her way through the crowds to get on Court 2 or 3 'uncomfortable'.  Well, hey welcome to the real world lady. Those horrid sweaty proles are the ones who buy the tickets and pay your prize money.  Not surprising that when her defeat was flashed up on the Centre Court during a break in a match the crowed clapped and cheered. Nice - no, understandable - yes.   I know she has a hard year, in fact we know all about it as it was raised and aired at every single interview and press conference and must have been seriously scary to be so ill, but time for Venus and Serena to learn that the world at Wimbledon does not revolve around them.

Heavens I was even wishing Sharapova  would win just to keep them out, shows how bad things have got.  

And the grunting and the screaming and the shrieking and no, I am not talking about the spectators, I am talking about the women players.  Sharapova makes no noise when she is practicing so we are left to draw our own conclusions as to why she does it when playing.  It was a pleasure to see a nice, QUIET girl come onto the court and wipe the floor with her and we have a new champion.   But that match was two sets of pretty mundane tennis which lasted just over an hour and a half and for that they get the same money as the men.  This year the men's final was not a classic but four sets of good tennis, nearly three hours so tell me why do the women get the same?   OK, better shut up now I suppose.

Delighted that Djokovic won the title, I am not a fan of Nadal as I find his time wasting tactics between points acutely irritating.  He regularly takes longer than the time allowed but is never penalised because of it and I think he should be. Other players are.  I know everyone says what a nice guy he is and sure they are right, but he has a really nasty mean look in his eye all the time which really puts me off and yes I know he is trying to win a match and I am being illogical but there you go.

Andy Murray - well what can one say?  He has the skill, he has the talent but until he stops behaving like Kevin the Teenager and getting all sulky and irritated when he makes a bad shot, he is not going to fulfill his potential.  Nadal, Federer, Djokovic - make a bad shot. Bugger. Forget it, don't do it again.  Murray ponders and pouts and slams his racket and winges and by the time he recovers a set has gone by and Nadal is thundering shots round his ankles and past his ears.   And I know I am going to sound like a fussy mother here, but really get a shave and a decent haircut and don't turn up looking like you have slept on the sofa all night and have not seen a brush or a comb for days.  If you turn up looking immaculate and taking pride in your appearance, it all helps.   This is Wimbledon for heaven's sake not the local Rec.

Andrew Castle said a shocking thing on the BBC the other day when asked about Murray. He said that 'perhaps he just wasn't good enough'.  Blimey, somebody actually coming out and saying so.  He is good but he is not as good as the top three and he is going to have problems in the next few years as there are other stars lurking who will soon eclipse him.   The next two years are his make or break years and I have my doubts.   I would love him to win the US Open in a few weeks, I would love him to prove me wrong. I really would.

Enough I think but cannot close with my moan (yes another one) about the BBC's obsession with slo-mo. After every single shot we see it again in slow motion and as this usually means somebody shouting YEEEEEEEEES, clenching their fist and opening their mouths as wide as the Mersey Tunnel, it is not a pretty sight.   Sweat flying off Nadal's hair in slow-mo also pretty revolting.  This sort of filming is getting very cliched now BBC.

Final word - in papers this morning news that loads of complaints have been made about the constant banging on about celebrities in the Royal Box.  Ok I can see that is irritating and I don't really want to see a parade of sportsmen or women who take part in a sport in which I have no interest, but appreciate that others do.  I don't really want to see Sir Cliff Richard again, though thank goodness he wasn' not singing this time, and I found the sight of the newly Knighted Sir Bruce Forsyth laughing and giggling with the Duchess of Cornwall quite fun. What I DO NOT WANT TO SEE is another bloody close up of Pippa  bloody Middleton who is in the Royal Box because she is the sister in law of the future King of England. She has done NOTHING of note or merit thought she looked rather fetching as she walked up the aisle behind her sister, but the BBC seemed obsessed with her and when Andy won one of his matches the camera zoomed in on her, not the Murray family, and out comes the comment 'Oh there's Pippa, bet she's pleased'

Pass the sick bag.....

Anyone for Tennis?

It is the start of the English grass court season and, true to form, after one of the driest three months we have had for ages, the rain is now pouring down and it is cold and grey. 

I have not been feeling too well this week so was glad to loll around on the sofa and watch the Aegon Championships at the Queen's Club.  Everyone and everything is decked out in blue to go with the company's brand which is a vast improvement on the days when it was the Stella Artois championships and everything was in a shrieking pillar box red.  A gift of a week as not only did Andy Murray make the final (he totally demolished Andy Roddick in the semis in under one hour - I have never seen him play so well), but we also had a Plucky Brit, ranked in the nether regions on the computer, also come through to the semi-finals knocking out two players in the top 20 and one in the top 50 in order to get there. Of course when this happens the tabloids latch onto it like a leech thirsting for blood and the whole thing was made even better as the player, Jamie Ward, is the son of a London taxi driver.  Oh Gor blimey Guv this proves that tennis is not a game for the upper class drones in England but is for the proles as well.  Throw in the fact that he has a cage fighter as a trainer/motivator and, well I need not go on - you get the picture.   Of course, nobody thinks for one moment that tennis is for the proles, you just had to take a gander at the audience at Queen's Club with their Pimms and the braying Hooray Henry types watching the tennis in between texting and taking calls. Pippa Middleton was there fresh from her hard week of watching the French Open in the President's Box, who is now a true Sleb and it goes without saying that the Beeb zoomed in on her at every opportunity. No doubt she will appear in the Royal Box at Wimbledon in due course....

(You probably think I am being slightly satirical calling him a Plucky Brit but this is what appeared in at least one newspaper and not a tabloid either.  I simply cannot imagine Nadal or Federer being called Plucky can you?  It is a Brit thing)

Still, he really did well and I was most impressed with his playing and his general on court demeanour and he seems remarkably unfazed by it all.  Considering he has spent the last few years on the lowly Challenger Circuit earning peanuts it was not surprising that his eyes lit up when he discovered that he was guaranteed a cheque for some £22k for this week's work.  Of course, Sue Barker, John Lloyd et al were building him up big time and saying how he could go on from this and do well.  We have all been there before.  Every summer we have a Plucky Brit knocking out a top seeded player and then after all the hoo-hah collapsing the next day against somebody ranked 999 in Outer Mongolia. Let's be honest here, Tim Henman made a career out of it.  I am probably being a bit unkind but the way these flashes of brilliance are seized upon by the sports writers in the summer is so predictable. They should know better by now that if you see the light at the end of the British tennis tunnel it is probably an oncoming train....

With all the rain delays there were lots of fill ins and the best one of all was an edited showing of the 2008 Wimbledon Final when Nadal beat Federer in five sets in one of the best tennis matches of all time.   Of course, being the BBC they couldn't just leave it alone. Oh no.  We had Rog and Raf reading out bits of Kipling's Poem 'If' which is above the door of the entrance to the Centre Court. Hugely embarrassing, cringe, cringe.  And then the slow mo....this was just so uber cool in the sixties when it was first used but now is just old hat and yet it is welded to the hearts of sport producers.  Yes, watching the balletic grace with which Rog plays in slow motion is beautiful but after he has pirouetted his way around the court dozens of times it gets a tad boring.   And somebody really ought to mention to the Beeb that a slow mo of Rafa's sweat drenched hair swinging round his head with the perspiration flying of it and his mouth also wide open is, quite frankly, likely to put you off your dinner.

Best fill in was a feature all about Boris Becker and how winning Wimbers at age 17 changed his life and how he found it really difficult to handle and then all the appalling racial abuse he and his black wife Barbara suffered. I remember reading this at the time and they had to leave Germany and live elsewhere. He was also very honest and open about The Encounter in the Broom Cupboard at Nobo Club which led to a daughter being born some nine months later who he could not deny was his as she is his spitting image.  Boris was very frank and humorous about his many mistakes and came across as a really nice guy.

Anyway, no matter how many times I know I will have to turn the sound off to avoid Pat Cash's witterings and mutterings and avoid a clearly uncomfortable MacEnroe trying to be positive when asked for the umpteenth time Do you think Andy Murray can win Wimbledon, I am looking forward to a fortnight of glorious tennis.  I love it all and have done since I first stood on the Centre Court back in 1964 and watched Maria Bueno play Margaret Court. Yep, that dates me.  I also saw John Newcombe, Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Nastase, Connors...oh the roll call is a long one and I tell you that though I now watch it in the comfort of my home on my super duper TV, there is nothing so wonderful as being on the Centre Court in the evening at the end of a long hot summer's day (yes we did have them) and watch a mixed or a men's doubles being played out. Though the doubles was taken seriously and all the big names played them, unlike today, it was usually played in a more relaxed and friendly manner and the players would sometimes goof around and the crowd loved it.  One marvellous moment I always remember, Newcombe and Roche were playing against Tom Okker (from Holland and known rather predictably as the Flying Dutchman) and his partner (whose name escapes me), when a ball came back to them.  N & R both shriekd MINE rushed to hit it, crashed into each other and fell over flat on their backs, somehow managing to get the ball back over the net, whence Tom and his partner also shriekd MINE rushed towards it and also crashed into each other.  I think it is the only time I have seen four tennis players flat on their back on the Centre Court.

Ah, happy days...........