indiana wrote:

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I recall the way results are reported being discussed a year or two ago, and I recall at that time the various parties clinging to their contradictory ways of putting the scores, particularly when the Brit had lost and is named first ( i.e. winning score first vs British score first ).

My own preference, for what it's worth, is basically how Steven consistently reports scores :

1) British player first win or lose. Not a biggee for one off matches and I can see how putting the winner first eliminates any doubt for that individual match. But when reporting on a number of results together, it looks much better to me to have all the Brits first, i.e. on the left, so I just tend then to do all scores like that : BRIT beat X or BRIT lost to Y....

2) BRIT lost to Z 6-4 7-5, as opposed to BRIT lost to Z 4-6 5-7. This is the most common divergence here and indeed between the ATP and WTA sites, so there really is no recognised way to do it.

As I said we seem to have survived carrying on reporting our different ways reasonably happily, so unless anyone feels really strongly, do we just continue as we each prefer ?

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When writing Richard Gabb's result, I thought that it could be confusing either way round so I think Indiana had a good point in the post that followed the one I've quoted, especially since retirements with scorelines like that are pretty rare, hence the few words of clarification would not need to be added very often.

I doubt we'll ever all agree on a format and it's not really this message board's style to try to force people down a particular route, but for what it's worth (i.e. very little!), here's why I write things out the way I do.

When a draw has lots of Brits in it, I find it easier to take in the most important features of a draw from a GB point of view if the Brits are shown first (or the higher-ranked Brit if it's an all-GB match) - I'm afraid I don't see which player in any given match appears first on the drawsheet as having much relevance.

I can see an argument for always putting the winner first in the results, but again I personally find it easier to take in the results if the Brit  is shown first and in any case, having set out the draw like that, it's much quicker to insert a "beat" or "lost to" than to have to copy/paste the non-GB player in front of the GB player every time a Brit loses. As Indiana says, there is no consistency even among the official sites over whether the winner's score is shown first or the first-named player's score is shown first when those two players are not the same person.

Whichever way round results are shown, I do find the / smileys (the 2nd in each pair denoting a rankings upset) help a lot, so that's why I use them. Indeed, when the early rounds of GB Futures are on and I haven't been able to pay too close attention, a scan of the smileys is (for me) by far the easiest way to see how good or bad a day it has been.

There are other times when I pick a slightly harder to write option just because I think it's clearer, e.g. "(x) Player Name WR nnn" (where x is the seeing number, Q, WC, LL or whatever and nnn is the ranking) instead of the simpler to write version that is sometimes used by other people of "Player name x nnn" - of course, (x) is a bit of a pain to type, requiring double use of the shift key, but I find it too easy to fail to miss seeding numbers, etc, in the other format and hence I imagine (rightly or wrongly) that other people do too.

I also use the "first name, surname" format because I find that easier to read when other people use it, though I can see a good argument for the "surname, 1st name" format that some people use, in that it automatically works for things like Chinese names (which I write as last name first) without leading to confusion over which name really is the surname.

In fact, in Hungarian, surnames are *always* written first too, but I don't switch them because they are European names and that would look weird, so I can't even claim that I always manage to be consistent with local usage!

Anyway, each to their own - it's hardly surprising that people find the format they use the easiest to read and even if I might find it a bit quicker to read all the relevant info in some formats than others, I don't think I've found anyone's format on here so confusing that I haven't been able to work out which way round the result is in a standard match.