indiana wrote:

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The Magician Santoro wrote:

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The depth of the British men is the best it's been in over 6 years with 18 men in the top 600.

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...and currently only one in the top 200    ( albeit a very good one ! ). In Steven's records stretching back to 1973 ( and I imagine to all intents and purposes any time before then ), only in 1990 and 2010 have we been in that position at year end.

Certainly the depth under 600 has improved since the end of last year with Golding, Fitzpatrick, Corrie and Marsalek coming in and Slabinsky returming, and only Eaton dropping out, but much higher level success still looks pretty elusive.  Oli is clearly the best looking prospect in the newer group.

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Yes, when trying to gauge the depth, the impression you get is very dependent on where you set the cut-off point, be that how many Brits are there in the top ?00 or how high is the Nth Brit ranked.

I think most people would say we have more depth in the women's game at the moment because there are 7 Brits in the WTA top 250, including 5 in the top 150, of whom 3 are in the top 100. Conversely, there is only one Brit in the ATP top 200, even if he is a grand slam champion!

But of course if you take the set the ranking cut-off a fair bit lower, it looks like we have more depth in the men's game than in the women's game, with 18 men in the top 600 cf. 15 women and (to arbitrarily set the cut-off to the one that makes this ratio most extreme in favour of the men) 73% more men than women (26 v 15) in the top 775.

In addition, the 25th highest-ranked British man is ranked over 300 places higher than the 25th highest-ranked British woman, though that and the last stat in the previous paragraph could be partly due to what I call the 'Borwell effect' - i.e. the jump in the number of promising British youngsters, especially girls, who might be ranked in the 500-1000 range if they had turned pro who have chosen to go to college in the US instead - it'll take a few years to see how that pans out as far as the rankings are concerned.

I think the best gauge of depth, in the men's game at least, is how many Challenger-level players there are, i.e. those who mainly play Challengers and regularly win at least a round or two in the main draw but also including young players on the way up who are going deep in Futures regularly and proving to be at least competitive in Challengers. Obviously we aren't doing great at that level and the last time we did have quite a few players playing Challengers regularly was probably around 2005, but most of them weren't really on the way up, as evidenced by how many retired or became doubles specialists in the year or two that followed.