On Thursday, Laura Robson put a photograph on Twitter: she wore a hospital gown and she had a cannula going into her wrist, a pulse oximeter hanging off her finger. “Posting a pic so people might finally stop asking when I’m playing at Wimbledon this year,” she wrote, clearly in decent spirits, or still giddy from the anaesthetic.
Robson had just had hip surgery, which makes her very much on trend. Andy Murray is also absent from Wimbledon this year, still not fully recovered from arthroscopic surgery on his right hip that took place in January. It is one of the perils of the game: tennis requires constant, explosive lateral changes of direction and the open stance favoured by modern players to strike their forehands puts extreme pressure on the hip.
Murray and Robson, despite her self-deprecation, have been sorely missed at Wimbledon, where British players have not found it easy going this year. Twelve found their way into the men’s and women’s draws, but by Thursday afternoon, only Kyle Edmund remained. Not since 2007 has a British player failed to make the second week of Wimbledon.
That stat is mainly down to the perpetual excellence of Murray. Even on one leg last year, he hobbled through to the quarter‑finals and took Sam Querrey deep into five sets. His absence has been discombobulating: one reporter here referred to the “Murray slot” (ie, third match on Centre Court), which he has made his own after years of teatime thrillers. He may never have had a scrappy patch of hilly grass named in his honour but he owns the two hours between 5pm and 7pm.
Still, a Murray-less Wimbledon forces you to confront more existential fears: what will life (or for many people two weeks of summer) be like after he’s gone?
Hip surgery is notoriously hard to recover from and it has altered the trajectory of many careers: Lleyton Hewitt, Tommy Haas and David Nalbandian among them.
Murray, who is 31, is certainly not done; nor, clearly, is the 24-year-old Robson. But his game is defined by running down every ball, outlasting his opponents. Will he ever reach the levels that took him to three grand‑slam victories? Not even he could know that for sure.
When Murray lost in straight sets to Edmund at the Eastbourne International last month, it could have felt like a passing of the baton. This would be harsh and even unwelcome for the new British No 1, who is seeded 22 here. Before this year’s Wimbledon, Edmund had made five appearances at the championships and won only a single match. He has such low name recognition that, in the press box on Thursday, I sat behind a colleague in the press corps who wrote an entire match report that referred to him as “Edmunds”. Perhaps he was thinking of Noel, although that’s spelled differently, too.
So where does this leave the State of British Tennis? On the evidence of the first week of Wimbledon, it has the depth of a paddling pool. Most of our players are dependent on wild cards to make the draw, and when they face stiff competition they are smashed.
Cue much hand-wringing about how we have the most famous, lucrative tennis tournament in the world and no infrastructure for bringing through young, homegrown players.
The logic is solid but it is not the full picture. Before the World Cup, the Economist drew up a statistical model to work out what makes a country good at football. After drilling down into all the international results since 1990, they found two main factors that predicted success: first, the wealth of the country (rich countries tend to be more sporty); and second, the engagement, or overall participation rate, of the people in that country. The model isn’t perfect. The Economist didn’t like to predict results, but it thought that Germany were a strong bet for the World Cup.
Nevertheless, perhaps a similar analysis could apply to tennis. On the first index – wealth – Britain would score pretty well. Last year, the Lawn Tennis Association committed £125m over 10 years to improving grassroots facilities (with plans to source a further £125m). The investment will mainly go on increasing the number of floodlit and covered courts – at present, just 7% of Britain’s 23,000 courts have covers and a tiny fraction have floodlights.
It is “engagement”, though, where Britain falls down. According to a Sport England study last year, tennis ranks 13th in the list of most popular sports activities. More people play badminton on a regular basis. The number of people who venture on to a tennis court every month is 721,100. In contrast, the United States has 12 million people who play the game regularly.
Even accounting for population ratio, that’s simply a massive talent pool in the US and a much greater active interest in the sport – down, in large part, to a better climate for playing it, you’d think. As a country, we’re the kid who never practises piano and is then surprised when they don’t pass their grade exams. We think we love tennis but then we have no idea that Laura Robson isn’t even playing at Wimbledon.
When we look for the next Murray, it feels logical to hold the LTA to account. And perhaps that’s right. It can have a massive impact on developing the game. But Wimbledon is a reminder of how difficult it is to create a tennis champion.
In the 32 seeds in both the men’s and women’s draws, there are 19 different nationalities. The United States is the most represented (with three men and five women), as the Economist model would predict, but in just the past 12 months alone the No 1-ranked woman has been German, Czech, Spanish, Danish and now a Romanian.
It is hard not to feel it will never be possible to create a conveyor belt of talent in tennis. The great players are just brilliant freaks. We need to fully appreciate Murray while he’s still around; it could be a long time before we see his like again.
