Week 5 - Challenger (€46,600) - Open Bretagne Occidentale, Quimper, France (indoor hard)

Madadman · Masters Series Champion

Week 5 - Challenger (€46,600) - Open Bretagne Occidentale, Quimper, France (indoor hard)

JonH · All-time great

A very good point !
twitter.com/LeonSmith/status/1091474377969938432

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

Humbert had a tough match today too, 6-4 in the third. And is not a 'strong' top 100 player - he's barely been there very long. Which is not too surprising really as he's only 20 and had his huge break through year last year.
Looking forward to it.....

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

Bob in Spain wrote:
Madadman wrote:
Done some digging into the ATP rules. So to answer my question it looks like he could.
EXCEPTION 1: A player who has entered and been accepted into the qualify- ing draw of an ATP World Tour tournament and has been withdrawn because he is still competing in a Challenger or Tour event in the same region, will be added to the last position on the special exempt list of an ATP Challenger Tour tournament scheduled for the next week, even though he would have been a direct acceptance, had he entered the Challenger.
As I said, I am no expert LOL. Logistically would be tough though as his only options would be Dallas, Chennai or Budapest.

Of which only Budapest is anywhere near being in the same geographical region... wink

Bob in Spain · Tennis legend

Interesting to note that with Dan's current ranking of 163, he was not seeded here and has had to play the extra round. In the other 2 challengers this week, Dan would have been seeded 5 in Cleveland and 3 in Launceston, both of which offered higher prize money and in the case of Cleveland, more ranking points as well. So this is a comparatively tough draw for a Challenger and makes Evo's efforts all the more impressive.

Jaggy1876 · Grand Slam Champion

As I predicted earlier I think by year end Kyle, Cam and Dan will also be really close in the rankings, probably all somewhere between 30-50.

indiana · Tennis legend

Bob in Spain wrote:
For those not on Twitter, Leon Smith has just tweeted the following:

Been watching Evo on livestream battle thru another match. Over 8 hrs on court this week. 2k for semis. Take in travel & coach travel&fee costs makes significant loss. Opponent takes home just over 1k for his efforts. How is that right? @ATP_Tour for this level of tennis?
He has a point. I would be very interested to hear his views on the Transition Tour as well.

Whereas the main ATP tour, and indeed WTA tour, offers many thousands just for turning up and getting beaten. Plus of course various mega amounts for progress.

Drip down. Nae chance, and seems if anything heading more towards the very much haves, the barely getting by at all or loss making challenger level players and the weekly serial loss makers beyond that - though maybe just wipe many of them out.

Stinky poo ...

indiana · Tennis legend

Jaggy1876 wrote:
As I predicted earlier I think by year end Kyle, Cam and Dan will also be really close in the rankings, probably all somewhere between 30-50.

Yes you did predict that. I believe also last May you flagged Cam to be ahead of Kyle by May this year.

So come the times we will see

freerider · Futures level

allez evo! I see this new round of 48 as being a de facto qualies round

stevemcqueen · Futures qualifying

Yesterday evening was the fast time I've ever watched two live sporting events at the same time! I think the Wales victory gave me even more delight than Dan's! At half time, I said to myself: Well, Wales have no chance of turning this around.....Nice to be wrong sometimes!

Oakland2002 · All-time great

Great result for Evo. I agree with general sentiment that he needs to listen to his body after a week like this and hit the yoga mat! He still needs time, 9 months back into his comeback he is obviously some way short of the level of conditioning he had when reaching an ATP final in Sydney and his best performance in a slam.

We have however moved on considerably from Wimbledon Qualys where by the time he played Bachinger after winning a qualifying WC play off, he was done and outclassed. Bachinger went out in another QF. Great to see such progress and one has to be mindful of the level he is now at, these boys are quality players and the likes of Bachingrr as fit as a butchers dog, Dan technically was a league above and is showing a fantastic degree of resilience on court, for Dan grinding out deep runs in tournaments when unseeded is more about making the road a bit easier next time so he takes advantage of the knackered unseeded player who picked off the 2 seed in the previous round. These are the hard yards to get to this level.

Leon has a point but the quality of the tennis is a reflection of the fact that a previous world top 50 player was on court grinding out a comeback, people will pay to watch him play but Dan is there as a product of circumstance and hopefully they will change. Unfortunately for tennis the ATP is just that an association of tennis professional, most who have the cash want to keep it. Those who arent quite there will make considerable fiscal sacrifices to get there but it is a choice and one that exists in all sports at some level, with tennis the level at which being professional tennis is sustainable is distilled to a tour of 150 players and that is because its limited at a competitive junior level to the upper middle classes. I dont think making a second tier of viable professional athletes that no one watches is of value to growth of the sport.

Leon is a great coach and justifies his salary but I am afraid his profession is part of the problem. The way Tennis is structured means all coaching is professional and at grass roots level they the coaches are able to make a decent living taking it from players right across the bottom level of the pyramid mostly from children learning to play, most parents cant afford it, to have three kids playing at a decent level two/three times a week with an individual lesson each you are talking £600 a month minimum. Who is going to do that? Sport is generally accessible to the whole of society there are so many sports a child can get coached to a very good standard and get a kick out of playing it well and competitively at pocket money prices, once passionate about their sport they will contribute in many ways, coaching, administrating and most importantly turning up in their droves to watch it.

Depth in any sport is a reflection on how many people love playing it as a young person and will pay to watch it at the turnstiles throughout their life.

Nix · Futures level

I completely take your point Oakland. It's just that he e level of adjustment could be tiny and still make a difference. If they just reduced the amounts given to the finalists and semi finalists of grand slams, for instance. So based on the Wimbledon prize money for 2018. If the singles winners got £2 million rather than £2.25m, the runners up £1m rather than £1.25m and the semifinalists £500k rather than £562k, and then extrapolated that across the other grand slams it would free up £4k for a thousand tennis tournaments across the men's and women's games.

If you then shaved off a bit from the masters series, then there really could be a little bit of a trickle down effect. The thing is the people at the very, very top might argue that they have very expensive entourages to maintain, but they also attract very lucrative sponsorship deals too. I should imagine just one of those could cover a large part of their expenses. And realistically despite the short career argument, would Djokovic, Murray or Williams really miss the sums mentioned? In practice, people who win the finals of slams reach the semifinals multiple times. I doubt if any of these players would notice the drop in income if they couldn't check it with their accountants.

Would players really boycott Grand Slams if they only stood to win £2 million? I'd love to see the people who run the game just make some small efforts to reduce the tendency to make the flow of the money in tennis ever upwards for the top players. Even though they play at that level for a very short period, the top players have all had to play at the lower levels of the tournament structure so they are all beneficiaries of it.

I support football as well and the tendency of the bigger clubs to hoard all th resources is killing the game. The top clubs need the lower level clubs to play their junior players and train them to be top pros as the junior levels are not competitive enough. But the lower level clubs are barely financially sustainable because they have to pay huge fees to loan in these players from the bigger clubs and also pay their fancy wages. Meanwhile they can no longer get transfer fees from the bigger clubs as they used to do in the old days because the bigger clubs hoard all of the talent. Meanwhile clubs are on the brink of financial ruin. I don't see how it's sustainable in the long run. There's a player called Batshuayi (known by by no means a household name) who's joined Crystal Palace on loan from Chelsea for just one season. His wages are reportedly £160,000 a week. The fee to his agent is £1million paid by Palace. The fee paid to Chelsea is £2 million. Like I say, it's just not sustainable.

Similarly, tennis needs to realise that the grass roots is a vital part of the game. It's no good having the Uber-players if they've got no one to practise against or no one to play in the early rounds. I wonder how many just fall by the wayside because they just can't afford it.

ps. I hope my calculations are vaguely right but it's for illustration only in any case

-- Edited by Nix on Saturday 2nd of February 2019 10:00:17 AM

Bruce · Lower Club Player

Bob in Spain wrote:
For those not on Twitter, Leon Smith has just tweeted the following:

Been watching Evo on livestream battle thru another match. Over 8 hrs on court this week. 2k for semis. Take in travel & coach travel&fee costs makes significant loss. Opponent takes home just over 1k for his efforts. How is that right? @ATP_Tour for this level of tennis?
He has a point. I would be very interested to hear his views on the Transition Tour as well.

Is Evo eligible for the LTA tournament bonus scheme?

https://www.lta.org.uk/globalassets/play/professional-development/documents/tournament-bonus-scheme-2019.pdf

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

Excellent point, Bruce.

I hadn't seen the new bonus scheme - cheers.

indiana · Tennis legend

Yes, point taken which was to be expected from somewhere that the lower levels of tennis don't attract the income to independently make these tiers sustainable. But it's all one sport.

Tennis as a whole most certainly has the income to drip down ( really it could more than drip ) and effectively subsidise that base, the bottom of what could be a more sustainable pyramid ( and the realistic starting aim for many ) which would arguably be much better for the continuing health of the sport as a whole.

I certainly do not see that every level has to be commercially driven, to be able to survive on its own. There is a much bigger picture here. Grassroots and the lower pro levels matter, initially attract. You can be a leading pro or nothing at all? - hmm, think I might try something else.

Let's not teach kids tennis at all and try to spread tennis unless it is commercially immediately profitable? Let's bow to the £/$ in everything? Getting it into tennis is good but then think broader.

As Nix so rightly says creaming just small percentages off these huge sums at the top and passing it down ( yes, subsidising ) could make a great difference, a positive difference to tennis as a whole.