Sustaining form is key to success

Johnny Watterson On TennisOn Monday in Dublin, Ireland's Davis Cup player Louk Sorensen knocked Frenchman Nicolas Tourte out of the Irish Open in Fitzwilliam. Tourte is 223rd in the world rankings, so he represented a significant scalp for Sorensen, ranked 336th.

At Wimbledon, 16-year-old Tamira Paszek defeated the 12th seed, Russia's Elena Dementieva, on her debut to go through to the fourth round, her best run in a Grand Slam event. Paszek, who lost yesterday, has gone up 100 places in the world rankings since the beginning of the year. Now at 54 to Dementieva's 13, she will be pleased with her work this week.

There have been countless such incidences of little-known players blowing away higher-ranked opponents, but the difficulty in tennis appears to be in sustaining winning form long enough to climb the rankings and thereby qualify automatically for the bigger tournaments.

Sorensen's measure will be how he continues on through the draw and through the season and whether he can also regularly beat not only players ranked lower than him but also seeded opponents.

The common refrain in London has been that the top 100 and even 150 men have very little between them (the women are perceived to have less depth below the top 20).

On any given day, any male player has a reasonable chance of beating any other male player, Roger Federer aside.

In the first round at Wimbledon, the Czech Tomas Zib, ranked 133, beat Diego Hartfield from Argentina, ranked 88. Andrei Pavel, ranked 122, beat Juan Pablo Guzman, ranked 100. And Luxembourg's Giles Muller, ranked 156, advanced to the second round at the expense of Spain's Oscar Hernandez, who is ranked in the world's top 50.

Yesterday, Janko Tipsarevic, now ranked 64th, played the former French Open champion Juan Carlos Ferrera in the fourth round. The Serbian, a main-draw competitor in last year's Irish Open, has moved from obscurity to centre stage in just 12 months.

For years the British tennis establishment have tried everything, including recruiting non-British players such as Novak Djokovic. There has been much recrimination and bellyaching, and even sackings, over the failure to produce more Andy Murrays. They have still not discovered the essential ingredients.

Britain's inability, like that of Ireland, is not in finding talented players - you think of Sorensen or Peter Clarke or younger talents like Mariana Levova and Amy Bowtell, who at 13 years of age made it to the final of a European under-16 event this week - but in keeping them healthy and interested and keeping them from hedging their bets by picking up scholarships in the United States.

There is little wrong with the US route in terms of obtaining a degree and playing some decent tennis on the collegiate circuit. But where does it all lead? It will not help, or has not yet helped, a player with ambitions to reach the top 100. It has not helped an ambitious player with hopes of some day having a run through the first week of a Grand Slam or playing on the regular ATP and WTA tours - not the satellites and the Futures events.

The BBC presenter, John Inverdale, was seen cornering Nick Bollettieri at Wimbledon during the week.

Inverdale's two daughters are keen tennis players and the gossip around London SW19 has it that Inverdale was talking about his kids with respect to Bollettieri's noted academy in Florida (think Agassi, Sharapova, Courier, etc).

Inverdale understands well enough there is high risk in launching tennis careers when players are very young.

Of course the odd big scalp is encouraging and captures attention for events like the Irish Open. Capturing the long-term commitment of youngsters is altogether harder.