Friday 16 October 2009

The Unreported World

Well, its been a while since my last post and I wonder whether my patient fans-a-plenty will still be there waiting... The Gymnastic championships have taken over London and 73 male tennis players have pulled out of the Shanghi Masters (inc Andy Roddick, see previous post, and Del Potro, see whatever post it was that I mentioned him), its easy to see how people have lost a little interest in tennis.

Our own Katie O' Brien (who? I know, bare with me) won a match at WTA tour level, not long after breaking into the top 100, which was a good result.  Not that anyone would know because no one ever mentions her, well not very much.   And here I have two gripes. One, that no one reports lower level tournaments, and two, that no one reports womens events.  Last year when Jelena Jankovic was actually playing super fantastic she won three tournaments back to back.  The Guardian (only newspaper I read) gave her about a paragraph nicely slotted into a two page story about Andy Murray sneezing or hurting his foot or something.

Frustratingly womens sports (because there is such a genre as 'womens sports') get little attention, so people don't know about the players or sucesses, and therefore no one wants to watch them play.  A nice vicious circle ensues.  The England womens football team got to the final of the European Cup, the first time an England team have reached an international final since 1966.   More attention has been given to the Mens Premier League or England Mens World Cup qualifying, which we can all agree is really boring.

Lower level tournaments get little attention either, so although our players have won titles in the last few months because they weren't at tour level they were hardly reported (unless you have a subscription to LTA weekly or whatever).  Similar to my gripe about Doubles Tennis; so rarely on TV, so rarely mentioned, so rarely remembered.

Katie O'Brien incidentally was beated by Wozniacki in the second round, shame, if she had won it would have been a boo yah ending to my email.  Well thats my understanding of boo yah anyway.

2 comments:

  1. I came here to vote in the poll, but it's closed. Should have been a 5th option though; "Who is Marat Safin?"

    Still, out of the 4 the first option sounds best.

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  2. sorry anonymous, but i cant keep these polls open forever

    ReplyDelete