Thursday 26 February 2009

What Would We Do If...

...we had to decide if Andy Murray will ever win a Grand Slam.

Paul Morris: I’m not going to pretend to know much about tennis, but his recent success suggests he’s on course for a major sometime this year. Yet when I watch Murray I’m just in genuine disbelief at how much he’s already achieved. He appears to adopt a style not too dissimilar to how I play tennis: just get it over the net and let the other bastard make the mistake. Now I’m not knocking this technique, as it seems to have the same effect against members of the ATP as it does the ‘tard I play. However, Murray’s extremely defensive baseline tactics are almost offensive when we see Rog and Rafa tear it up every other month.

I could bang on about his general attitude and (lack of) personality for hours but three words sum it up pretty definitively: miserable Scottish twat.

Stephen Pietrzykowski: If Andy Murray were born south of the border, opinions of him would change a little. While it's undoubtedly true that he's sour faced and consistently unimpressed, if we were to project these attributes on to an English sportsman the contradictions in our judgment would be apparent. We'd be celebrating necessary grit and focus in an increasingly competitive game, rather than condenming him for lack of grace and gratitude. He's not playing to national type, it's being imposed upon him and that's to our detriment, not his.

Murray will win a Grand Slam. His exponential improvement over the last year shows that an inevitability and his record over supposedly the 'best player ever' is proof of this if needed. How he defeats good old fashioned English prejudice however is another matter entirely.

Kevin O’Neill: Though I pulled the Scottish card last time to claim objectivity, this time I'm denying it for the same reason. I don't have a patriotic chubby for the lad, but I feel confident in saying that Andy Murray will definitely win a grand slam. I'd prefer it if it wasn't Wimbledon; let him have the Australian or the US (I'd rather Nadal wins the French until the day he dies, also). Murray has the ability and the spirit to compete with the best of them. What he doesn't have right now is the physical side or the discipline. His fitness and strength are improving, and within a couple of years, he'll get the formula right.

Ryan Taylor: I fucking loathe tennis. My hatred was sealed when, having for some unknown reason agreed to work at Wimbledon, I was sacked about half way though the tournament. I was up until then working as a porter, or more accurately a gimp with a stack truck and a lot of overpriced strawberries to ferry.

Though my point is this. This was the mid nineties and serial quarter final botherer Tim Henman had the place in raptures. The height of Henmania if you will, about a year or two before the fickle tossers switched to Rusedski Ridge for a brief spell before coming back to the smirky twat until he retired empty handed to sell washing powder full time.

You'll miss him when he's gone they used to say. And BOOM! along comes this Scottish upstart with a lobotomy and unnerving disregard for self worth and Timothy is a distant memory. We have A New Hope. Someone to pin those dreams upon, someone to hold a torch for for ten agonising days until he meets a good tennis player or someone in form. It’s the experts that come out of the woodwork for those two weeks that really irk me.

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