European domination of tennis confirmed

We have, as I write, reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open Tennis Championships and the semi finalists, in both mens and womens events have produced a situation previously unprecedented in any grand slam. All eight players are European. Three Serbs, one Spaniard, one Frenchman, one Swiss, one Russian and a Slovak. It's quite an amazing landmark in the advance of the European continent as the dominant tennis area of the world but it is merely confirmation of a developing trend.

All world sports go through cycles of domination and tennis is no exception. When I was a small boy the dominant power was Australia with players like Hoad, Rosewall then Laver, Emerson, Hewitt, and in the ladies events, Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong (later Cawley). Then the baton passed to the Americans with Connors, McEnroe and later Sampras, Agassi and many others in the mens championships and the likes of Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova (even if she was imported) and later Lindsey Davenport and the Williams Sisters.

If you look at the tennis horizons in both Australia and the United States, the situation currently looks quite bleak. Of the men only Leyton Hewitt carries the Austalian mens banner with any likelihood of any success and even he will probably never get back to his standard of five or so years ago. There are no Australian women of any real top class quality in sight.

The American decline has been almost as spectacular. With the retirement of Agassi and Sampras, the American mens game is primarily in the hands of Roddick and Blake. Roddick one suspects is a player of tremendous energy and serving power but possesses a lack of real technique which exposes him severely when in the company of the likes of Federer and Nadal. Blake is still young and may get better but having just watched him play Federer, I get the impression that he has no real confidence that he is truly up there with the big boys. Among the women, Lindsey Davenport has retired and the mantle is in the hands of the Williams sisters. Serena looks as if she has lost interest and has other fish to fry, and that is supported by her ever expanding waist line. She has always been big built but now looks positively lumpy and correspondingly sluggish. Her performance against Jankovic, a player who herself has looked out of form, seemed almost lackadaisical, as if her mind was elsewhere.

Venus Williams has come back from the temporary shadow of her sister and now looks the better and fitter player who, on her day, can pull off some marvellous performances and win Championships. But those days are fitful and unpredictable, and one gets the impression that the psychology of both sisters suggests that neither is in it for the long haul. Without them American womens tennis seems in a parlous state.

Meanwhile the Russians, the Serbs and the Spaniards, in particular, seem to keep churning players off the production line just as the Americans used to do. Maria Sharapova seems to have come back to her best with a stunning win over the world no 1 , Belgian Justine Henin and a Slovak girl, Daniela Hantuchova, who I once feared would be a talented but emotionally fragile failure, has reached her first grand slam semi final.

Maria Sharapova

Daniela Hantuchova

In the mens game, Serbian Novak Djokovic is stunning everyone with some terrific performances and he has now reached yet another semi final. But of course the immediate accolades, and for the immediate future, go to one Swiss, the immaculate Roger Federer, who seems to make the game seem easy and to reduce first class tennis players to the level of club night beginners. So now is the decade of European domination and who can say how long that will contine.

Novak Djokovic



Roger Federer



Of course you can always rely on some things in world tennis. The British. We have one player of genuine world calibre in Andy Murray now that Henman has retired, and I seriously doubt if he has the stamina and mental strength to go all the way to winning grand slams, any more than Henman had. The rest are pretty dreadful and as for our women players, well, the highest is ranked about 128 in the world and the next around 232 so enough said about that!!

So as a tennis fan I shall simply bask, for the next few years in being a European (although my fellow countrymen resist the tag) and forget about being British.