http://www.thesportreview.com/tsr/2010/03/great-britains-davis-cup-embarrassment/ Independent Sports News and Opinion Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:29:01 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.thesportreview.com/tsr/2010/03/great-britains-davis-cup-embarrassment/comment-page-1/#comment-7131 David Cunningham Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:50:43 +0000 http://www.thesportreview.com/tsr/?p=12150#comment-7131 Sacking John Lloyd is not going to help - it will just cost money to terminate the contract and achieve very little. He picked the players he had available to him, but they simply were not good enough. Even if Dan Evans had won the fifth set, and therefore the tie, the situation with the state of British tennis would be unaltered. The LTA deserve some criticism, but making them the scapegoat for everything that is wrong means that we are not addressing the real issues. The problem is the private tennis clubs: they are generally self-funding and run by their members as a social club, and the LTA has no real say in how these private clubs are run. I was chairman of such a club for a few years and I know that most committee members want their club run as a social club where mostly middle-aged people can get a friendly game of doubles. Many clubs do not consider that tennis development is really anything to do with them - in fact they expect that people who want to join the club already know how to play. I believe the only way forward is to create another layer of sports tennis clubs at grass roots level, orientated around juniors, development and competition. This could probably only be done by cooperating with local authoraties and schools. Sacking John Lloyd is not going to help – it will just cost money to terminate the contract and achieve very little. He picked the players he had available to him, but they simply were not good enough. Even if Dan Evans had won the fifth set, and therefore the tie, the situation with the state of British tennis would be unaltered. The LTA deserve some criticism, but making them the scapegoat for everything that is wrong means that we are not addressing the real issues. The problem is the private tennis clubs: they are generally self-funding and run by their members as a social club, and the LTA has no real say in how these private clubs are run. I was chairman of such a club for a few years and I know that most committee members want their club run as a social club where mostly middle-aged people can get a friendly game of doubles. Many clubs do not consider that tennis development is really anything to do with them – in fact they expect that people who want to join the club already know how to play. I believe the only way forward is to create another layer of sports tennis clubs at grass roots level, orientated around juniors, development and competition. This could probably only be done by cooperating with local authoraties and schools.

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