Why Brits are useless at tennis

(Before anyone gets too excited – Andy Murray, Tim Henman, Greg Rusedski and Laura Robson (the latter on the basis of youth) are exempt from the argument below.)

Wimbledon – in which various undeserving British tennis players get given wild card entries to a Grand Slam tournament and mostly fail to get to Round 2. This year is no exception. Day 2 was a parade of futile pluck until Elena Baltacha found a way to beat a much higher ranked player as darkness fell.

And what did she do when she won? Dropped to her knees and celebrated as though she’d won the title!

Not  to be too critical of Baltacha, but that’s not really the right response to a first round win (well, it might be if you’ve just beaten Venus Williams). If you have serious ambitions, then you should be looking at getting to the second week at least. But Baltacha, in her own words, isn’t: ‘I will also get into the main draw in the US Open and I am not playing anything after this week’.

She (and every other Brit) should be thinking not about having a week off, but about winning the next match and finding a way into the second week. I suspect that this attitude is a big part of British tennis’s problem, and the gifting of wild card places only encourages it. So wild cards only for rising talents please – serial failures need not apply.