Laurie's Tennis articles

Great Britain celebrated Andy Murray winning Wimbledon for the second time in his career.  A significant victory for Murray, it now puts him in a slightly elevated status in terms of open era tennis greats.   There are a few great players who won two majors in their career, but not many have won three and stay there.   As of now, Andy has the opportunity to win more majors before his career ends. However, Andy’s victory brought out the inevitable comparison of eras from British journalists who were getting (over) excited about Andy’s success.  I read an interesting article by Sean Ingle of the Guardian newspaper.  In the article Sean gave us a variety of statistics which was designed to come to the conclusion that in any other era Murray would have been a multi grand slam champion, most likely at Wimbledon.  So far Murray has played in eleven major finals, winning three of them.  Eleven finals puts Murray in the top echelons for appearances in...

From my experience, I have developed a method in which I feel I can progress players from their early years to around 12, which gives them a great base to progress their tennis into adulthood. There are so many permutations and factors that will enable a player to develop that there has to be a huge amount of adaptation for individual needs. Once you go down the path of trying to fulfil individual needs, the time and commitment increases massively and so does the cost, time and commitment from the parents. The ‘bread and butter’ to any successful programme is having a good flow of players coming into the game, which can be attracted through schools, advertising, word of mouth etc. Kids nowadays have so many things going on that you need to be able to offer sessions most days of the week. When a child shows a great attitude, passion for the game and a desire to be better, then cease the opportunity to help them further! We have a programme called the Talent Development Programm...

Novak Djokovic created a lot of history last weekend on the tennis court.   By winning the French Open, Novak became the first man to hold all four grand slam titles simultaneously; this has not been done since Rod Laver won the calendar grand slam in 1969.   If that wasn’t enough, Novak also became the first man since Jim Courier in 1992 to win the Australian Open and French Open in the same season!   This now means that Novak has an opportunity to complete the calendar grand slam, which has not been on the cards since Jim Courier in 1992. This is a most incredible achievement and puts Novak in a unique position in the history of modern tennis to hold all four titles.   However, at the same time, Novak is the third man since 2009 complete the career grand slam of winning all four major titles.   Prior to 2009, Andre Agassi completed his feat in 1999 when he won the French Open; and then we have to go back to Rod Laver in 1969.   In Novak Djo...

Tennis has been in the news a lot this year and we are still in March.   It started at the Australian Open when the BBC and BuzzFeed made reports of match fixing which had been taking place over a number of years.   That was already well known but it was suggested that the Tennis Integrity Unit had not been taking the accusations seriously enough, did not investigate properly and the unit was too small to be effective, mainly comprising of a few part time senior ex policeman.   ATP Chief Chris Kermoode refuted this claim and promised robust actions.   However, in the last week, the Italian Authorities claim they have evidence of top 20 tennis players being involved in match fixing and accused the tennis authorities of not doing enough to bring these players to justice. If that was not bad enough, Maria Sharapova announced to the world not her retirement which some journalists had predicted, but that she failed a drug test for meldonium which was...