FSOM: British tennis continuing to serve faults

Let us all give thanks to Grigor Dimitrov for what he is doing for women’s tennis.

We can only hope the LTA use him to do something similar to the British game.

You might not instantly recognise Dimitrov’s name.

As of June, he was ranked 31st among male players, equating him to Nigeria in FIFA’s world football rankings.

But he is better known as the current squeeze of Maria Sharapova, and the former boo of Serena Williams.

This has prompted one of the biggest bitch-fests since Queen Elizabeth I gave the condemned cell a lick of paint, invited her executioner to get a nice keen edge on his axe, and then invited Mary Queen of Scots around to a Tudor Anne Summers’ party.

Dimitrov is the net as the words have flown back and forth between Sharapova and Williams like a battered ball in one of their 30-stroke rallies.

Fifty Shades is the last man on the planet to try and second guess what goes on inside any woman’s head, but even he cannot see what the world’s top two tennis players see in him.

He may be an absolute charmer with chiselled features, a ripped body (a hugely overrated thing, in Fifty Shades’ opinion) and hidden assets well-disguised in his tennis shorts.

But Sharapova and Williams could pretty much have their pick of chaps, even if their busy schedule makes it difficult to date anybody outside of the close-knit community of tennis Chippendales.

So it seems even stranger that he has charmed the wristbands off not one of the world’s top tennis players, but the next as well unless, of course, there is another game being played here besides tennis.

Perhaps Sharapova lassoed him and corralled him as an act of revenge towards Williams, an indication that the American couldn’t take all the prizes.  In other words “You take all the titles, I’ll take your boyfriend.”

Either way, it has lit up women’s tennis like a match tossed into a petrol-soaked barbecue pit with a box of fireworks on top.

The row between them has simmered for a while like a spat between Nikki Minaj and Rihanna over who has the most bodacious booty (or, depending on your taste, whose rear end least looks like two little boys fighting under a blanket, when they walk) but has now erupted like Mount Etna.

If nothing else, the row has sparked some interest into a women’s tournament that had all the makings of a coronation procession.

In the meantime, British interest in Wimbledon – in all tennis, in fact, will last as long as Andy Murray does.

You can only feel sorry for Murray, who resembles Atlas in the way he carries British tennis on his shoulders.

Not only is he hefting the weight of British male tennis, he’d find it difficult to see the next Brit in the rankings if he was looking through the Hubble Space telescope, that being James Ward at 219.

There’s a little cluster of Brits huddling together for warmth in the mid-200s; Daniel Evans (255), Alex Bogdanovic (275) and Klein Bryden (279) who is a household name, only in the Bryden household.

Let’s bandy figures about.

Spain, France and Switzerland each have two players in the top ten.

Serbia – a country with the same population as Wales – has three players in the top 50, France have 12 players in the top 100, Spain 13.

To put things in perspective, the balance of tennis power does shift. Australia was once a powerhouse of tennis that produced players like Laver, Rosewall, Newcombe, Roche and Cash. But they only have three in the top 100, with their top-ranked player Bernard Tomic, coming in at 59.

Likewise the USA, which has eight players in the top 100, but Sam Querrey at 19 is the top-ranked Yank, from a tennis nation which could boast the likes of Sampras, Aggassi, McEnroe, Connors.

Looking at the ‘laydeez’, Laura Robson and Heather Watson fly the Union Flag in the women’s top 100 but after that the rest are about as far behind as the little lad with the gammy leg who was left behind when the Pied Piper took the kids of Hamelin into the mountain.

That’s still better than the Aussies, who only have Sam Stosur in the top 100, although unlike Robson and Watson, she has to put a reserve on a hotel room into the second week of most tournaments.

Even the innumerate Fifty Shades can line up stats to suit his purpose, but it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that while being rubbish at tennis is but a fleeting summer cold in most countries, in Britain we are seemingly constantly confined to bed.

And for that, you can blame Mrs Felicity Smythe of The Glades LTC and her besties.

Felicity Smythe, – or Flip, as her pals Jules, Tiggy, Jemima and Bonkers call her – is an alias, as is The Glades Lawn Tennis Club.

But they are real, all existing in a tennis bubble of cosiness in the Home Counties. The courts are all maintained and manicured, the pavilion a timber-boarded tribute to creosote, there is always a good supply of hot water in the showers and the clubhouse does a really nice light lunch on weekdays, which is when Flip and the gels like to play while hubby is off in the city making a mint dealing in commodities or futures.

These are the people who play tennis in our green and pleasant land.

The Lawn Tennis Association can protest all they like, but the truth is tennis is perceived as a middle-class pastime, rather than a full-blooded, manic, angry and heated sport, played by hard, tough professionals.

Of course, the LTA is in a bigger panic than Graham Norton hearing his favourite bar has run out of gin at the warning Sport England has dished out regarding its funding.

In a nutshell, Sport England has told the LTA it has to get more people picking up a racquet and playing, or lose some a chunk of its wedge.

The LTA’s current dollop of cash is £17.4m for the next four years, a fall from the £24.5m it got in the previous four-year cycle.

So far, it’s received £3.75m for talent development, and £3.35m for participation, but Sport England is holding on to the other £10.3m like a parent withholding pocket-money from a naughty child on the promise of good behaviour.

Credit to the LTA for coming up with schemes to try and get more inner-city kids playing the game, because that’s where the ‘hungry’ players will come from.

After all, the Williams sisters were brought up in the ‘hood, Compton, South Central LA, while Sharapova had to endure hardship in the early years when her family moved from Russia to Florida.

The LTA’s dilemma is that they will probably get kids interested in the game, with their inner-city initiatives such as Pop-up tennis courts which are carried around in a large bag, and other games involving spongy balls (not a medical condition!) and bats that look like plastic waffles with a handle.

But at some point, if these kids are going to progress, they are going to need competition, and the way British tennis is structured, that will involve going to or joining a club.

There they will be confronted by the formidable barrier of Flip and her chums.

Dwayne, Chaz and Kenisha from the sprawling estate have shown some promise and latent talent but when they are taken along to The Glades, they are made to feel about as welcome as a pork pie at a Bar-Mitzvah.

Flip and her pals pay £3,500 annual membership fees at The Glades, and there’s no way Flip is going to give up her Wednesday morning doubles medal competition to a load of oiks, especially when she and Jemima have got into the semis.

How do Dwayne, Chaz and Kenisha feel when they turn up in T-shirts and cut-offs, Nike Hi-tops and borrowed racquets, and they get the icy stare from Flip who has just splashed out on a couple of pastel-shade Lacoste polos, a pair of K-Swiss Big Shot shoes, and a spanking new Head Graphene racquet (no change from £500 there for that lot, but hubby does like her to have a hobby and he loves her bronzed and toned calf muscles)?

The metaphorical ‘No Entry’ signs go up and the social barriers come down at clubs up and down the country.

Club members like Flip don’t give the furry crack of a rat’s backside what Sport England threatens to do to the LTA’s funding. After all it won’t affect them much.

They will continue to fork out their £3,500 to keep The Glades a nice, friendly, sociable club, where you can come and have a nice game, and nobody gets too aerated if they win or lose.

Keep the riff-raff out. Let them in and they might start playing too hard.

The result can be seen not 50 yards away from Fifty Shades’ workplace.

Across a road in a public park is a pair of hard-surface tennis courts. They are not in use at the moment, because there is nobody to hire them out. The courts are an attachment to the franchise of the adjoining café, but the local council can find no taker.

Even sadder is the sight another 50 yards into the park of the former grass courts.

As a kid, for the four weeks during and after Wimbledon, Fifty Shades and his grubby mates would scrape together the spondulicks and with racquets bought from Woolies, play on these beautifully maintained grass courts, in the heart of the city.

Cuts mean the council can no longer maintain them, and although the fencing that prevented our wayward shots escaping is still there, it now encloses an area for exercising dogs.

Fifty Shades has searched harder than OJ Simpson looking for his wife’s killer, but he hasn’t seen any sign of the LTA’s crash-emergency team rushing to breathe life into this public tennis facility.

Only a few days ago, Fifty Shades was taking a lunchtime constitutional in the park when he heard the unmistakable ‘Thwack’ of racquet on tennis ball and when he looked his heart gave a little skip of joy to see that somebody had glommed a key from somewhere and was playing tennis on the hard court.

Fifty Shades went to investigate, and perhaps see if the next Andy Murray was about to be unearthed on the south coast.

Unfortunately, as Fifty Shades got closer, the voices he heard in between shots spoke Spanish, while those waiting to get up on court next were German.

Fifty Shades couldn’t see or hear any English youngsters gagging to get a set or two in before sundown. Perhaps they got fed up waiting for Flip and her mates to let them in at The Glades.

Where’s Grigor Dimitrov when you need him?

By John May

Follow @maisy68

This photograph was provided by ebbandflowphotography.