Douai Park Tennis Club Blog

I haven’t been able to watch any play at Wimbledon today, but I glanced at the Wimbledon Slam Tracker a moment ago and not only was Roger Federer being beaten in four sets by Tomas Berdych, but Rafael Nadal was 0-5 down in his first set against Robin Soderling.  What with Venus Williams going out yesterday this year’s Wimbledon has the distinct feel of change in the air.

Talking of new talent, all may not be so gloomy for British tennis. Not only is one of Andy Murray’s main obstacles now out of the way, but it seems our juniors aren’t doing too badly either. For a quick summary on the state of our junior tennis check out this report by the BBC here. May yet be grounds for optimism.

Yes, it’s here at last, our annual super-fix of all things tennis, the Championships at Wimbledon.  With only a couple of British men (neither of them English) in the draw we might be limited in whom we can support, but who knows this might be Andy Murray’s year. We’ll be following the action here, reporting and linking to anything of interest to our members.  As a starter, why not check out the draw for the first day here on the always excellent official Wimbledon website.

Andy Murray held out in the first round of the French Open, battling back from two sets down to beat Richard Gasquet.  Despite his opponent’s home advantage, Murray kept going until he turned the game. As he said afterwards:

“I just managed to come back in the end by fighting hard and believing. You need to try and stay focused on your own game and against someone like him it’s tough. I looked up at one point and he’d hit 59 winners and 30 unforced errors. It’s difficult but you just need to chase everything down and believe in yourself.”

Score: 4-6 6-7 (5-7) 6-4 6-2 6-1

Full report here

Here’s a good article from the BBC based on an interview with Judy Murray. In it she talks about how she believes her training of Andy & Jamie differs from the LTA’s approach. As she says:

“If you want to create kids who can win you have to teach them how to win, not just how to hit the ball.”

Particularly revealing though is the penultimate paragraph where Judy reveals that it was by playing against seniors (“a bunch of 60-year-olds”) at their local Dunblane club which really taught her sons how to win matches. You can read the full article and hear the interview here.