seagull wrote:

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Bring on the grass season

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 we've still got RGQ to suffer through yet.

Count Zero wrote:

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seagull wrote:

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Bring on the grass season

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 we've still got RGQ to suffer through yet.

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Wont have anyone there will we?

Ward GBR v Alvarez ARG - 6-7(4) 0-2
Evans GBR v Jeanclaude FRA - 4-6 6-6 (*0-3) (Jeanclaude broke yet again then Dan broke him as he served for the match)

Whatever this brick wall is that James hits in the later stages of these tourneys he really needs to overcome!

to hammer Illingworth and o'brien and then get hammered by an average player is disappointing

Good effort from Evans today!

Disappointing to see the Brits lose today but well done to James and Dan for getting to the QFs and all the others who won their opening match - QFs is still worth 3 points which is better than nothing, and as long as they keep building up their points slowly by winning a round or 2 each week they'll move up the rankings and then get more confidence/nicer draws/direct entry to go really deep

Ward seems to have a mental block when he reaches the latter stages which isn't great but at least he gets there often enough - it does make me concerned about whether he'll ever go beyond the top 350/400 though

Well done to Evans and Milton for getting to the doubles final, although I'd have preferred to have seen Bamford and Skupski get the points with their higher doubles ranking

Oops, I've just turned my mobile on again and found that DJ did stay for a bit longer after saying he was going home and texted me a couple of doubles results (i.e. for all the conspiracy theorists, I didn't deliberately not add them LOL), however stircrazy seems to have put that right already.

Yorkie mentioned the brick wall that James seems to hit in the latter stages of tournaments (including this week, he has reached 8 SFs, 5 more QFs and 8 more R2s in the last year but hasn't made it to a Final), that certainly mens he's doing it the hard way, in the sense that in a Future, you have to win three main draw matches to get SF points, but you get extra points equivalent to SF points for each win after that.

I remember that a couple of years ago when I was first doing the GB top N tables, hardly any Brits had 18 counting scores, and this was despite a point being available for a R1 loss in a Challenger or a R1 WC loss at Wimby (both of which are no longer the case) and despite us having a lot more players in the top 500 than we do now.

At the time, that seemed to indicate a lack of consistency, with players relying on one or two great weeks and/or good draws to account for much of their ranking. However, when I was looking at the chances of Miles, Edward and James reaching the top 500 (although James has now made it, they all missed out at one point because they had played more tournaments than players on the same number of points who sneaked in ahead of them), I noticed that the opposite now seems to be true, and maybe that's more of a problem from their point of view than the previous lack of consistency was.

Out of the Brits in the top 1000, Josh, Slabba, Bloomers, Ward, Seator, Kasiri, Blake, Rushby have all taken significantly more tournaments to get to the number of points they have than ANY other player who has the same number of points. In Josh's case, there is only one other player to compare with, but for some of the others, there are 10 or more players on the same number of points who have done it with less effort.

I realise that the figures now are not strictly comparable with those two years ago because all tournaments are now counted instead of just scoring ones, but I noticed the same effect a few weeks back when it was still number of scoring tournaments that broke the ties.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that these guys are prepared to play lot of tournaments to make their rankings the best they can be, but the sheer number of Brits in this position does suggest that we have more of a problem than other countries of players coming up against brick walls in the QFs and SFs at the moment and I wonder why that is.