Australian Tennis at "Lowest Ebb"; France's Mladenovic Receives AO Wild Card

With the Australian Open starting in just about a week, the discussions of what's wrong with Australian tennis have begun. This type of conversation is guaranteed three times a year, once for each of the English-speaking countries who host Grand Slams (I'm not conversant enough in French to know if this happens before Roland Garros, but since there seems to be a general satisfaction with their system and results, I'm guessing it doesn't) and The Australian recently offered this article, which comes at the problem from a slightly more sympathetic perspective than most of the Australian press. Most of the time, a newspaper calls a former Aussie great who is not involved in the current Tennis Australia framework and the criticism of Steve Wood and Craig Tiley begins.

Ashley Cooper is certainly a former great, but he is apparently part of the TA process, saying that while a number of factors are to blame, there are probably the result of what was not done "8 to ten years ago."

Craig Tiley, the AO tournament director and head of player development, who expects to see improvement by 2012, offers this:

"If you ask me to predict how many players in the top 100 by then, I'd be in a different business if I knew that," Tiley said. "But I can tell you we have about 100 players we have targeted that we think can get there and if we work on the 10 per cent theory, that's 10. It takes 15 years to develop a player, so I can tell you there will be more than there is now and more than there is in the past.

"In the past we had some players (Pat Cash, Lleyton Hewitt, Pat Rafter, Mark Philippoussis) at the top and that masked the problems down at the bottom."

This is an interesting perspective because it implies that French system, where there are large numbers of top 100 players, but precious few Grand Slam champions, is more desirable than the opposite. Is Federer masking a problem in Switzerland's player development? Or is he just, as all great champions are, a sublime exception that owes little to his particular federation?

Another theory floated about the Australian decline is the disappearance of backyard courts due to development. John Fitzgerald subscribes to that, and his remarks can be found in this article from the Canberra Times. (The Observer article mentioned in this piece is more about the general decline of Australian sport, and it can be found here).

Tennis Magazine's Peter Bodo recently wrote a post for espn.com, providing background on the purpose of wild cards and congratulating the USTA for holding a wild card tournament to fill the one it exchanges with Australia. Tennis Australia holds a tournament to hand out one set of theirs--this year they were won by Colin Ebelthite and Jelena Dokic--but they have four sets of discretionary wild cards remaining after the Asian, U.S. and French wild cards. Only one set has been announced, with 18-year-old Jessica Moore and 21-year-old Carsten Ball the recipients, but speculation is that the remaining three sets will go to younger players. The Australian notes that Moore and Ball have shown a "drop in performance," then mentions the younger players that are likely to be given wild cards in this article.

And speaking of the French, they do not appear to follow the wild card tournament route, unless they squeezed one in that I did not hear about. Kristina Mladenovic, the 15-year-old French junior, was given the Australian Open main draw wild card, despite her indifferent end to the 2008 junior season, where as the No. 1 or No. 2 seed, she lost in the second round of the Yucatan Cup, the third round of the Eddie Herr and the second round of the Orange Bowl.

Tags: junior tennis, Tennis Australia, Craig Tiley, Kristina Mladenovic, Colette Lewis