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A Brit of true grit

Eye-grabbing contests the order of the day...

Barry Cowan Posted 22nd June 2011 view comments

The 125th Wimbledon Championships is well underway

Throughout the tournament Sky Sports pundit Barry Cowan will be here to answer your questions and reflect on the biggest stories emanating from the All England Club.

Click here to email your questionas Andy Murray attempts to become the first British winner of the Men's singles title for 75 years.

Day Three

Heather Watson has had a brilliant 12 months.

Delayed start: Watson in action at the recent AEGON International

Delayed start: Watson in action at the recent AEGON International

She's been as high as 93 in the world and is on track to qualify for the US Open; today she faces Mathilde Johansson in a match she should win.

There is bound to be a great deal of pressure and expectation on her and the way she responds to that should give us a good idea of where her game is at.

In contrast, Laura Robson has had a very disappointing year and her priority must be to get back to a place where she enjoys her sport and feels able to express herself.

Starting your Wimbledon campaign on day three is never ideal but most players learn to adapt to the delay, particularly if they've been given plenty of advance warning.

Barry Cowan
Quotes of the week

I don't feel that has been the case of late. She has been the focus of a lot of attention at Wimbledon ever since she won the Junior's here in 2008. Hopefully she can follow the lead of Elena Baltacha and Anne Keothavong and advance with a victory over Angelique Kerber.

Starting your Wimbledon campaign on day three is never ideal but most players learn to adapt to the delay, particularly if they've been given plenty of advance warning.

I've always felt that the players who can relax are the ones that cope with those situations better. Waiting around has far more of a negative effect on the 'stress machines'.

Tough

The British men, Andy Murray aside, were always going to find it hard to progress. James Ward had a really tough draw against 19th seed Michael Llodra - one of the very few genuine grass-court players around.

Similarly, Dan Cox and Dan Evans faced considerably higher-ranked opponents. Evans actually did very well against the tricky Florian Mayer, but Sergiy Stakhovsky made life predictably difficult for Cox.

That's the reality of where Britain is in the men's game; there's no denying it - the rankings are poor. Going forward, much more emphasis must be placed on developing players who have a genuine chance of being considered for a wildcard and who also have the potential to go deep in the tournament.

Murray's prospects of beating Germany Tobias Kamke in round two look fine. I don't see any reason why he won't come out with the same attitude he adopted in beating Daniel Gimeno-Traver.

The organisers have taken the interesting decision to put him on Court One. They obviously want to be fair to all of the players, and rightly so; they don't want to be seen as having favourites.

Test

Murray's first proper test should come from the third round onwards. The same goes for Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, both of whom eased through their opening matches on Tuesday.

Federer's scores always tend to be a little closer than those of Djokovic, who dropped just six games en route to beating Jeremy Chardy, because he comes out and plays aggressively right from the word go.

The most important thing for the Swiss was that he didn't suffer a repeat of last year's traumatic first round match against Alejandro Falla.

I reckon he was probably slightly nervous about that but once he beat Mikhail Kukushkin in the first set he was able to relax and play more naturally.

Upsets

So far the tournament has been short of upsets; those that have come have come in the women's draw with Jelena Jankovic and 10th seed Sam Stosur falling by the wayside.

That said I still believe this is shaping up to be a terrific tournament, particularly on the men's side.

I'm sure the England cricketers - past and present - in attendance at yesterday's play would agree.

It is always very special to see sportsmen watching sports other than their own. Most tend to thrive on that one-on-one combat which is at the heart of tennis and I'm sure many of those cricketers would have been surprised to see just how high a level Federer and Djokovic play at.

Thankfully the rain that blighted their Test series against Sri Lanka didn't follow them to Wimbledon; hopefully that will be the case for the rest of this tournament.

Comments (1)

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Trevor Perezs says...

Nice article very informative for reading thanks for this post it's very helping in my sport

Posted 13:26 22nd June 2011

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