Indian tennis faces an uncertain future in the face of a severe talent crunch
I was astonished to read that last month India and China together took the staggering amount of 2.4 million tonnes of coal — more than 50 per cent of South Africa’s 4.9 million tonnes of coal exports – a record proportion. India imported 1.4 million tonnes of coal from South Africa in February, up from 720,000 tonnes in January.
What can we derive from these figures? Take the positive spin and congratulate India’s industrialists for providing the means where such vast quantities of natural resources have to be imported to satisfy the demand of the nation.
It is a precarious transition, but while I was reading this article about coal, my mind turned to sport and I began to think about India and South Africa and about how both countries right now lack natural tennis resources. Put a negative spin on the tennis resources of both countries and you would have a trading stalemate between the two: neither country has any tennis talent to boast of.
South Africa’s female tennis players do not match up so well either. Their highest-ranked singles player is the 26-year-old Chanelle Scheepers who is world number 134, but then you will find the 19-year-old Natalie Grandin occupying the number 412 spot.
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Just four players from India and South Africa in the top 500 of the WTA World Rankings. The country of Serbia, for all its turbulent recent history, boasts six players in the top 500, including two former World Number Ones in the 25-year-old Jelena Jankovic (now world number nine) and Ana Ivanovic, the 22-year-old 2008 French Open Champion, whose recent loss of form has seen her slide to world number 28.
India’s male tennis players fare just a bit better than their South African counterparts in the men’s ATP World Rankings, but it makes for sombre reading to see how low down in the pecking order all of them sit, in the world of professional tennis.
South Africa’s highest-ranked singles player is 23- year-old Kevin Anderson at world number 127, and after him there are four more South Africans in the top 500 in the world, whose ages range from 24 to 29 years. Forgive me for supplying you with statistics, but the age factor is crucial in tennis because it is a young person’s game. Pete Sampras retired at the age of 32. Cricketers enjoy longevity — Sachin Tendulkar is in glorious form and he is 37 next month.
Roger Federer, arguably the greatest tennis player of all time, is 28 years old, but has 16 Grand Slam titles, and he’s still counting!
Where are India’s tennis players? Where are the natural resources which, for a few years in the late nineties and early years of this century, looked so rich in potential with Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes, India’s magnificent flag-bearers?
Bhupathi and Paes, with 22 Grand Slam Doubles titles between them in the men’s doubles and mixed doubles events — they won four Grand Slam men’s doubles together — took over the mantle that had been so gracefully worn by the Amritraj brothers, Vijay and Anand, in the 1970s and 1980s. Vijay Amritraj, twice a quarter-finalist at Wimbledon and at the US Open, is the only honorary Asian life member of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, an honour of which he so proud, but how much more pride might he feel if his son, Prakash, could realise some of his potential as a chip off the old block?
It is a sad indictment of India and South Africa that tennis in both countries has been allowed to decline to where it is today. Bhupathi is 35, Paes is 36, and even though Leander won the 2010 Australian Open mixed doubles with Zimbabwe’s Cara Black, you have to wonder why the younger guys are so far behind.
Mirza won her first and only Grand Slam title — with Bhupathi — at the 2009 Australian Open mixed doubles, but Sania has gone from world number 30 to 92 in the singles, a slide that must surely cause more than a few ripples of discontent in the corridors of the All India Tennis Association. Perhaps it is with Yuki Bhambri, India’s former world junior number one, that the future of Indian tennis lies, or at least, he is a marketable tennis player who has already proved at his young age what it takes to reach the top. His next two years are critical in how he shapes as a player.
Coal imports will keep the home fires burning and the industrialists happy, but India’s tennis is crying out for a new rich seam of talent. It starts at the grassroots. It starts at the coalface.
ALAN WILKINS is a TV broadcaster for ESPN Star Sports. Inside Edge appears every alternate week