This guy is a top columnist on LTA :
Shame on the sham of blazers' top spin
Stephen Bierley
Thursday January 10, 2002
The Guardian
In a few days the chief executive of the Lawn Tennis Association John Crowther and assorted council members and their partners will ease out of their first-class seats at Melbourne airport and be chauffeured to their soft beds in a luxury hotel. They will then turn up at the Australian Open, smiling brightly, pressing flesh and attempting to convince anybody prepared to listen for more than half a minute that British tennis is at last heading in the right direction.
And all this will be performed in the safe and certain knowledge that, whether they are proved right or not, the Wimbledon Championships will cough up another £30m profit this year for the LTA, with no strings attached. There is no other business deal like it. Only the United States Tennis Association has more money, yet the LTA persistently fails to achieve anything. Take away Tim Henman, who did not come through the LTA system, and Greg Rusedski, who arrived via Canada, and the situation is desperate, parlous and getting worse year by frustrating year.
The current world rankings of the top five British men, excluding Henman and Rusedski, are these: Martin Lee (103), Jamie Delgado (147), Arvind Parmar (211), Barry Cowan (218) and Mark Hilton (395). Britain has no women in the top 150. These are shocking statistics, reflecting a downward spiral that shows no sign of being halted. And yet the LTA continues to produce any number of meaningless statements claiming that progress in being made and that the infrastructure has been put in place that will ensure tennis will be at the future forefront of British sport.
It is a sham, a charade. The LTA peddles propaganda with the assiduity of a governmental department, although New Labour bowls straight up-and-down dobbers compared with the amount of spin the LTA generates in its press releases and information brochures. Crowther's time has been littered with "radical" proposals and "extensive" reviews but, whichever way one looks at tennis in Britain, the decline is obvious - except to the LTA. But then it enjoys a blind security of tenure that bears no relation to results.
Any outsider looking at the way the LTA operates would ask two questions. What is the national popularity of the game? (Answer: declining.) And what success are its top senior players having at an international level? (Answer, disregarding Rusedski and Henman: little or none.) The all too obvious corollary is that in a world in which tennis is competing against other activities for people's time, money and energy, its national body, the LTA, is letting it down dreadfully.
Noel Coward's "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington" might pertinently be rewritten "Don't let your daughter [or son] near an LTA tennis coach". It has been obvious for at least the last two decades that British senior tennis coaches are simply not up to the job.
It goes without saying that, if more youngsters played tennis, then there would be a greater chance of world-class players. And yet, despite the odds, Britain regularly does produce talented 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds, only for them to disappear without trace.
The Frenchman Patrice Hagelauer, the LTA's performance director, is a good man and has placed great emphasis on increasing the base of the junior pyramid. Yet he has not got rid of a single coach in the last two years. Small wonder they love him.
Hagelauer said at the start of last year that he wanted to see at least five players in the ATP and WTA Tours' top 100 by 2003. A fat chance there is of that. Anyone at last year's national championships at Bolton could not help but be filled with an aching depression - poor competition, low standards, same old coaches puffed up with self-importance born of nothing.
The success of Henman and Rusedski, aka the Davis Cup team, has for five years masked the steady decline in British tennis. It would probably take a genius or a dictator to start to put matters right. Crowther has failed, though he is not alone. There ought to be a public inquiry but public money is not involved. However, many members of the All England Club are deeply unhappy with the LTA's singular lack of success, together with the obvious and profligate waste of the Wimbledon profits. Surely Crowther and his cohorts cannot keep making excuses in the face of such obvious failure.