JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Cricket, football, but what about tennis?

by

Colin Murray
2009 days ago
20200123

Cur­rent­ly, dur­ing an ex­cit­ing West In­dies four-day crick­et tour­na­ment lies an im­pres­sive line up of in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et se­ries. We have just wit­nessed the end of the West In­dies vs Ire­land and In­dia vs Aus­tralia se­ries. At present, Eng­land is op­pos­ing South Africa in an ab­sorb­ing test se­ries with the 'pom­mies' lead­ing 2-1. Mean­while, Zim­bab­we is locked in bat­tle with Sri Lan­ka and the West In­dies Un­der-19 team is mak­ing us proud of their ex­ploits in the Un­der-19 Crick­et World Cup in South Africa.

Still to come in the next few days: the pow­er­ful In­dia squad has moved across to New Zealand for a full se­ries of all game for­mats and Pak­istan will play Bangladesh in a se­ries of T20 games. Crick­et fans will have a vast se­lec­tion of games they should look at. Spoilt for choice?

In foot­ball, the Eu­ro­pean leagues are in full swing and with the Cham­pi­ons League re­sum­ing in 3 weeks, our foot­ball fans must be lick­ing their lips; and lo­cal­ly, the Pro League is un­der­way. Hope­ful­ly, we see some qual­i­ty foot­ball and coach Fen­wick can iden­ti­fy some ex­cit­ing lo­cal tal­ent for the So­ca War­riors.

But with all things hap­pen­ing in those two sports, it is our ten­nis fans who must be ex­treme­ly ex­cit­ed with the start of one of the 4 grand slams in the ten­nis world. The Aus­tralian Open served off last Mon­day and will cli­max with the fi­nal at Mel­bourne Park on Feb­ru­ary 2nd.

As Mel­bourne is 15 hours ahead of us here in T&T, it means our re­al ten­nis fa­nat­ics may well be ru­in­ing their sleep pat­terns and re­main­ing awake at 2, 3 or even 4:00 am to take in the ac­tion. The ques­tion is - who will win the Men's and Women's ti­tles this year? The big three, Rafael Nadal, No­vak Djokovic and Roger Fed­er­er (the lo­cal favourite?) have dom­i­nat­ed men's ten­nis for well over 15 years and you can cer­tain­ly put your mon­ey on at least one of these three in a fi­nal. How­ev­er, it ap­pears the next gen­er­a­tion of ten­nis stars are not on­ly get­ting clos­er in terms of men­tal­ly be­liev­ing they can de­feat the icons in the ten­nis world, but they are win­ning games against them with some scin­til­lat­ing ten­nis. Aus­tri­an star Do­minic Thiem and tal­ent­ed Greek Ste­fanos Tsit­si­pas con­test­ed the ATP fi­nal at the last tour­na­ment in 2019 and I ex­pect 2020 would be an in­ter­est­ing year on the men's cir­cuit. Some­how, I an­tic­i­pate there will be new names on the var­i­ous tro­phies for the grand slams.

Nadal, Djokovic, and Fed­er­er are still ranked one, two and three in the world re­spec­tive­ly; with Dani­il Medvedev (Rus­sia) Thiem and Tsit­si­pas fill­ing in the fourth, fifth and sixth po­si­tions. We all know that on the day, it is who plays the more ag­gres­sive ten­nis and has the right men­tal at­ti­tude that pulls one through. There is no sec­ond chance if you lose. All three icons are in their thir­ties - Nadal 33, Djokovic 32 and Fed­er­er 38. You have no choice but to ad­mire them, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en that they are some­how still able to strike fear in­to the hearts of their op­po­nents. But, it must be even more dif­fi­cult year in year out to main­tain their fit­ness lev­els; their tech­ni­cal abil­i­ty is not in ques­tion so how do you main­tain a high lev­el of fit­ness when you have 21 to 26 years old op­po­nents all around you? Spare a thought for Roger Fed­er­er - what a su­perb ath­lete this man is. You may re­call that in the 2016 Aus­tralian Open se­mi-fi­nals at age 34, he suf­fered a torn menis­cus and un­der­went knee surgery and all the ten­nis com­men­ta­tors said he was fin­ished, he would nev­er come back as the same play­er. But, as the say­ing goes, class is class and form is tem­po­rary. Not on­ly did he come back, but he won the Aus­tralian Open in 2018 and reached the Wim­ble­don fi­nal last year. The man is just pure po­et­ry in mo­tion on the ten­nis court but at 38, I can't see him adding to his phe­nom­e­nal 20 grand slam ti­tles.

I sup­pose the big ques­tion is, who will win it? I guess I will sit on the fence and play it safe and say ei­ther Nadal or Djokovic but al­so, keep an eye out for play­ers of the new gen­er­a­tion as they are hun­gry for suc­cess.

Turn­ing to the ladies, an­oth­er 38 years old will hold the spot­light. Ser­e­na Williams is seed­ed num­ber 8 in the tour­na­ment and not on­ly has she had to deal with moth­er­hood, but she has been plagued by shoul­der and knee in­juries over the last few years. De­spite these set­backs, when fit, she was still able to reach two Wim­ble­don and two US Open fi­nals in 2018 and 2019 al­beit los­ing all four. She won her first ten­nis ti­tle last week in three years since giv­ing birth to her daugh­ter. Can she fi­nal­ly equal Mar­garet Court's 24 grand slam ti­tles since be­ing stuck on the lone­ly fig­ure of 23 since 2017? If Ser­e­na stays fit she may well do it at 38 years young. The women's game has grown tremen­dous­ly with some re­al pow­er hit­ters and much of that cred­it has to go to Ser­e­na. With the likes of lo­cal Aussie Ash­leigh Bar­ty, Karoli­na Plisko­va, Nao­mi Os­a­ka (my favourite) and Si­mona Halep, there is no longer a fear fac­tor of Ser­e­na but rather a mu­tu­al re­spect fac­tor and hav­ing lost to Os­a­ka and Halep, they will be ooz­ing with con­fi­dence with the be­lief that they can de­feat her again.

Two play­ers that have won 12 grand slams be­tween them - Venus Williams (7) and Maria Shara­po­va (5) seem to be past their best and will have to de­cide on their fu­tures as both were knocked out in the first round.

Who­ev­er you choose to sup­port, we should see some high-lev­el qual­i­ty match­es. As the say­ing goes, life is like a game of ten­nis; the play­er who serves well sel­dom los­es. En­joy!

Ed­i­tor's note: The views ex­pressed in this col­umn are sole­ly those of the writer and do not re­flect the views of any or­gan­i­sa­tion of which he is a stake­hold­er.


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored