Yawn Tennis

I had to go down the road to Wimbledon yesterday. After hunting around for some bits of shopping, I found myself in the Centre Court Mall next to the station. As I came out of a shop and saw the sign, the awful realisation hit me - just a week to go until the b***** tennis.

It isn't just that the media will be saturated with the sport, it is also that the roads around here will be one massive traffick jam. It is absolute murder trying to get from A to B around here as all the side streets and main roads get clogged by people coming hither and thither swarming like flies around the All England Club on Wimbledon Park Road .

There used to be a visual joke about a crowd of people in a stand moving their heads in unison from right to left and back again as they watched the ball going shuttle between the two players on the court in front of them. Much fun was made of this phenomenon as humourists  ran ever more surreal scenarios as to what the crowd might be watching. That joke has largely disappeared. The reason? Well, there is very little of the ball going backwards and forwards between players these days. The ralley has become a thing of the past. (Some people might not know even what a ralley is.) I think that this is the reason I dislike modern tennis so much. In all of sport I do not think that there is anything quite so exciting as an acrobatic, fling yourself around the court, slam after slam ralley. I can remember them reaching fourteen or fifteen knocks before weariness or mischance sent the ball skying out of the playing area.

But now we seem never to see such prowess and agility in action. It is there all right. These are fine athetes. Well, yes, you might see a little bit of a ralley of up to five hits, but never what we saw in the past.

Is this just nostalgia for a slower, gentler age? Possibly. But the prime mover in the change has been technology. The materials that go into the manufacture of rackets and the string have made the rackets move the ball faster and with greater accuracy. There are far more aces now than there ever used to be. And now the ability to blast the ball has become an end in itself. They even have a speedometer calibrating every serve.
So what we are left with is a dreary blast, counter-blast of a game where amazingly fit, but otherwise (it has to be admitted) desperately dull young people fire balls at each other. Eventually in an hour or two, one will wear the other down, and will emerge the victor or victoria. I can't be doing with it. Dull. Dull. Dull.

How can the administrators of the game have let it get to such a pass? They could change the rules a bit to encourage more rallies - a softer ball? They could shorten the matches. Do we really want to see hours of just two sweaty twenty year olds slugging it out on television? Why so long? Boxing matches are just minutes, fencing matches are seconds, ping-pong - just minutes again. But there is a nasty great big fix going on. The All England (???!!?) Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (all of 375 members! I suspect Barnsley Tennis Club has more members.), the BBC, the equipment manufacturers, the corporate sponsors all have a massive vested interest in keeping things just the same.

Apart from getting duller, Wimbledon hasn't changed since John McKenroe foul-mouthed his way into the tennis establishment thirty years ago. All the other great sports have transformed themselves in the last twenty years. More action, more strategy, more zest, more unpredictablity. In Wimbledon everything stays the same. It has painted it self into a corner. A very lucrative corner where the punters turn up in droves, hoodwinked into believing what they are seeing is something to do with fun and spontanaeity. No it is all just a great big money making machine. I have no worries about the money making. But it is the machine that I object to.

Henman Hill will turn into Murray Hill, and in twenty years their clones will be doing exactly the same, year in year out.